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I was texting back and forth with a good friend about the film’s I had yet to watch in order to complete my yearly Oscar challenge. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was one of them. Not for any deep reason beyond it was on Netflix so what was the rush, really? I think he succinctly put it best in that chat by describing it as thus: “Buster Scruggs is a Coen movie. It’s good but eh.”
Short, sweet, and to the point, that agnostic declaration of the film held true for myself when I finally got around to watching it. Comprised of six vignettes, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology set in the American frontier. There’s a certain lack of essential Coen eccentricity here. These stories are misanthropic, blackly comic, violent, and frequently add up to something less than their parts. Four of them vary from good to great while the other two are merely there.
The first section provides the film its namesake, and it’s a happy-go-lucky cartoon filled with geysers of fake blood and quirky country tunes. It’s a lot of fun even as it ends up feeling rudderless and like confirmation of the worst criticisms of the Coens filmography to date. There’s at least some personality on display here, which is more than can be said for the next two entries. James Franco sure does look handsome in his cowboy gear, but that’s about the only thing going for that segment. It plays like a Sergio Leone epic as refracted through a screwball prism then zapped of personality. The next story with Liam Neeson feels like a remnant of a horror anthology or something far more macabre than the rest of the film. It’s visually elegant but it doesn’t mesh with everything surrounding it.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is only as good as any particular moment, but it has to work hard to gain back the steam it loses by the time Franco’s mumbling about or Neeson’s buying a chicken that can do simple addition. Things manage to pickup in the final three segments, two of which are adaptations of other material. They adapt Jack London in “All Gold Canyon” and get Tom Waits to star in it, and it’s worth watching just to see that rascal play a grizzled prospector. This strangely feels like a part Waits was born to play, and his sour voice and gruffly textured face feel weirdly at home. The story involves a lot of waiting around for incident to happen, so its charms are squarely upon Waits’ skills as a character actor.
The best of the lot is “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” adapted from a short story by Stewart Edward White. It follows a pair of siblings hitching a ride with a wagon train to Oregon and the tragedy and chaos that ensue. Zoe Kazan is the one true innocent in the film, and her performance emerges as the best of the film. Hers is the most fully developed story and character with clear wants, needs, and the persistent feeling of inevitable tragedy that’s smartly deployed and slowly builds towards an anxious-fueled shootout.
Things wrap up in a stagecoach, which sounds boring but “The Mortal Remains” is a nice bit of funereal dread. It helps keep your attention when actors such as Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, and Jonjo O’Neill are delivering the twisty words and tricky tone. This one feels a bit like a gothic tale from Edgar Alan Poe reskinned as a western, yet it ends the film on an ambiguous note of mordant humor and unease.
