The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen brothers once again draw inspiration from Hollywood’s golden age for their latest minor amusement, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs—an anthology of shorts set in the imagined Old West. Each of the seven tales takes on tropes of classic western cinema: The Gun Fighter, The Singing Cowboy, The Grizzled Old Gold Prospector, The Traveling Impresario and his Artist, a bank hold-up, a hanging, a wagon train under threat from Indian attack, and a group of travelers from divergent backgrounds forced to share space on a stagecoach. Most of the stories are darkly comical, and all of them comment, in one way or another, on the fragility of life.

Like most anthology pictures, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is uneven; there are some solid segments, a few mediocre entries, and a couple of forgettable chapters that drag the overall movie down. However, unlike most anthology pictures, audience opinion on which parts work and which don’t will not be uniform. The cast is terrific across the board, with standout performances from Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck, and exuberant comedic turns by Tim Blake Nelson and Tom Waits.

Of the many features recently picked up and released by Netflix, this is perhaps the most fitting to consume at home rather than in a cinema. For one thing, its episodic structure is well-suited to home viewing, since people often watch movies in chunks when streaming, rather than all the way through in one sitting (and this inconsistent work may benefit from that). Also, the feature is presented as chapters in a book, the text of which is not on screen long enough to read. I imagine if one were to hit pause and read what the Coens have written on the book’s pages, it would be pretty entertaining.  Lastly, the movie looks like crap. Or, I should say, the movie has the look and production values typical of today’s “Third Golden Age of Television” — heavily processed visuals, color-graded to the point of absurdity. This is the first picture the Coens have shot digitally and if there was ever a textbook example of the difference between film and digital, this is it!  Compare The Ballad of Buster Scruggs with ANY other Coen Brothers feature (even their previous one, the visually unimpressive Hail, Caesar!) and you’ll be hard pressed not to notice the flat, sloppy, “fix-it-in-post” quality of Bruno Delbonne’s lifeless photography in Buster Scruggs. But then, this is a movie about death, so maybe lifeless visuals are thematically appropriate.

Twitter Capsule:
The Coen’s darkly comic collection of western tales is as uneven as most anthology films, but which chapters work and which don’t will depend entirely on the viewer. Great cast, lousy photography.