[wpdevart_youtube]_2PyxzSH1HM[/wpdevart_youtube]
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
****
Dir: Joel & Ethan Coen
Starring: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Brendan Gleeson
(USA, 15, 2hr 12mins)
The Coen Brothers have made plentiful use of Western tropes in their 30+-year career, from the appearance of Sam Elliott as a mysterious cowboy in The Big Lebowski, to the dustbowl setting of O Brother, Where Out Thou?, the neo-Western ambience of No Country for Old Men, and onwards to the pastiche of the singing cowboy as played by Alden Ehrenreich in Hail, Caesar!
It’s strange then, that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is only their second “out-and-out” Western, the first being the remake of True Grit in 2010. Or is it really that strange? Nothing in the Coen’s film-verse is ever as it first seems. What initially starts out as a series of humorous half-sketches on various cowboy archetypes quickly develops into something much more sinister and nihilistic.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was initially developed as a TV series for Netflix, until the Coens decided to truncate the individual episodes into one wholesale film. Anthology films like this, even ones with the same authorial voice throughout, are often patchy, the results of a series of ideas that weren’t quite good enough to be fully-formed features. Even though Buster Scruggs does seem inconsistent at times whilst watching it, it lingers on afterwards, the various stories making interlinking connections long after the fact.
The six mini-stories included here range from the humorous to the absurd to the ugly and bleak. The opener, the eponymous Ballad, is easily the most satirical, with Tim Blake Nelson’s singing cowboy and all-round killing machine breaking the fourth wall and regales viewers with his inability to keep out of trouble. The third story, Meal Ticket, is easily the ugliest, and all the more shocking for it. Liam Neeson plays a hardscrabble theatre impresario who travels with a limbless actor (Harry Melling), who delivers speeches from his repertoire. Crowds are initially enthusiastic, but they dwindle and dwindle, until pure economics kick in.
This being a Coens film, it’s not much of a spoiler to say that somebody dies in nearly every section. Some die by the pure hard luck of chance, some by stupidity, some by hubris. There’s no validation in any of these deaths, just a shrug before life moves on, an emblem of the cruelty on which America was built, and on which it built so many of its myths. It’s a continuation of a lifelong obsession of the Coens; not so much fate or destiny, as pure bad chance amidst the chaos and disorder of the world. It’s there in the presence of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurgh in No Country and the haplessness that uncovers the spy plot in Burn After Reading. It’s also there in the Dybbuk scene at the start of A Serious Man and swills about in the briefcase full of ransom money in Fargo.
Chaos and disorder are the unifying thread of the film, culminating in the final story, where five travellers find themselves cooped up together on a coach ride in the night, expounding on their various philosophies. Two of them, it transpires, are bounty hunters, carrying their dead cargo to its location. The final section is deliberately, gloriously anticlimactic, leaving us unsettled without ever really knowing why, as if all the characters are forever teetering on the brink between life and death, as if the coach is on river Styx carrying them across to the Underworld.
In individual moments The Ballad of Buster Scruggs may not feel like the greatest of Coens films – only the passing of time really tell us about the sophistication buried into every frame the brothers put together. But what emerges is a deeply unsettling and occasionally bleakly humorous picture of the chaos of life, as it staggers around us, drunk on disorder from one day to the next.
words Fedor Tot
Out now in selected cinemas and on Netflix from 16th Nov.