Mark Reviews Movies: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 15, 2018

None of the characters in the six stories of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is thinking about death when we first meet them. Each of them has something else on his or her mind—a song, a bank robbery, putting on a show, looking for gold, moving to the coast, arriving at a hotel for the night. Death comes, though, regardless of their preoccupations and usually under rather unexpected circumstances. It is the Old West, after all, but the period doesn't really matter when it comes to such things. People have ignored or dared death for as long as there have been people, and barring some impossible cure to mortality, we'll keep ignoring or daring death until it's too late.

This is, obviously, some weighty, nihilistic material, but because the film comes from Ethan and Joel Coen, it is also as funny and clever as it is despairing and hopeless. It's an anthology film, composed of six tales that are unconnected by plot or characters. Looking at those stories individually, there's some distinction in quality: Most of them are good or slightly better than that, and two of them are either very good or great. Considering them as a collective, though, there isn't a bad story among them, which is a rarity for such projects. More importantly, there's a unity of tone, theme, and narrative intent that makes it feel like more than a mere collection of short stories.

With the Coens writing and directing all six segments (not to mention the strength of Bruno Delbonnel's discreetly discrete cinematography between stories), there's a single vision here. It's of an Old West from the movies that both embraces and plays with conventions. That vision announces itself quite strongly with the first segment—one of the two best ones—with a title that comes from the film's title and with the eponymous character, a traveling troubadour, dressed all in white.

Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) seems like a good guy, given his dress and the pleasant way he addresses the audience. He calls himself "the San Saba Songbird," but on his wanted poster, requesting that he be brought in dead or alive, he's known simply as "the Misanthrope." Buster disagrees with that one—not the "dead or alive" part.

The man with the pleasant baritone and the polite demeanor is little more than a ruthless killer of men, who'll pull off trick shots with his revolver (or, unarmed, find a grotesquely ingenious way of dispatching a foe—the film's funniest gag) and then sing a demeaning song about the recently departed. Buster imagines himself invincible. He pays for his ego, of course, but the Coens also give him something of an out—and a hope that he'll be meeting all of us again one day.

Ego plays into a couple of these tales, including the second one, called "Near Algodones." It stars James Franco, as a cowboy and the would-be robber of a bank in the middle of nowhere. This one is primarily a running joke about the unexpected: a seemingly harmless bank teller (Stephen Root), who is perhaps over-prepared for the possibility of a robbery, and a series of coincidences that put the cowboy in a noose and save him from it, only for the law to come looking for him for something he didn't do.

One of the more subtle touches of the film in general comes from its simple framing device: a storybook that serves as our entrance into and exit from each tale, with color plates hinting at what's to come and the creaking rocking chair of our unseen page-turner. Look quickly enough before the page turns, and one might catch the real end of each tale, often related in a cold, objective tone that hits home how detached the Coens' world is from the concerns of these characters and their assorted adventures.

The device also keeps things moving when one story doesn't quite follow its predecessor. That's the case with "Meal Ticket," the third one, which tells the story of a traveling impresario (Liam Neeson) and a limbless actor named Harrison (Harry Melling). As they go from town to town, collecting less and less money from a diminishing audience, the relationship between the two men is communicated with quiet clarity. It seems to be the actor's story at first, but soon, his companion figuratively takes to center stage, revealing an uncommon cruelty in how he sees everything but money to be disposable.

Money is also key to "All Gold Canyon," which features a very funny Tom Waits as a prospector looking for gold in an idyllic valley. It's the quietest, most patient of the bunch, mostly because it's about a character who is the epitome of patience. The only thing more patient than him, though, is the natural world. The animals of the canyon flee when the prospector arrives and return once the greedy machinations of humanity abandon their sanctuary.

The best of the segments is the fifth one. In "The Gal Who Got Rattled," Zoe Kazan plays Alice, the sister of a failure of a businessman (played by Jefferson Mays), who finds herself quite alone on a wagon train heading to Oregon.

This story does a lot of things in a limited amount of time. It gives us the study of a woman trying to find herself, now that she has no one to define her, and a sweet romance between Alice and Billy (Bill Heck), the abundantly decent and good-natured leader of the wagon train. Also of great import—although we have no idea about how great at first—is Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines), the elder co-pilot of the train. He is almost entirely silent, except when he's called to action during the intense climax, and seems quite uncaring, until the devastating finale and the final text show and tell us differently.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ends with "The Mortal Remains," a funny clash of philosophy between the five occupants of a stagecoach and, perhaps, an allegorically fitting conclusion to this memento mori. Whether or not it is an actual trip with or to death is irrelevant. It feels like one, because the Coens know that the best kind of short fiction encourages us to read between the lines. All six of these stories, individually and collected, provide us with plenty of open space to ponder.

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