The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

 

Joel and Ethan Coen's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology film with separate vignettes set in a fanciful American West. The film has drawn the usual brickbats that critics toss at the Coens: threadbare material, an overly cartoonish tone, an over indulgence of schtick. All this is somewhat true, yet this film sings to me both literally and figuratively.

The film is a pointedly ersatz one. The framing device of a leather bound book points to the allusive nature of the work. This is a film that draws upon the mythology of the West rather than attempt a realistic narrative: more Cat Ballou than True Grit. Indeed, allusions to other movies, songs, legends, myths and even critical texts abound. One example is Zoe Kazan's bullet to the head which draws upon Shelley Winters' two different reactions to similar gambits in Winchester '73 and The Scalphunters as cited by the late Philip French in his superior tome, Westerns (pg. 88). There is plenty more to mine here for future Coen scholars and that explains critical resistance to their work. They are smart alecks, anathema to high toned reviewers since the days of the Cohens' antecedents, Wilder and Kubrick.

I would further compare this duo to Preston Sturges in that their scripts are usually superior to their visual style. Still, Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography lends a lustrous dimension here whether supposedly lensing Monument Valley or the Rockies. The film's chief distinction is the highfalutin dialogue memorably enacted by Ms. Kazan, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Tyne Daly, Henry Melling and, especially, Bill Heck. The music by Carter Burwell is very good, the song renditions even better. It was to be expected that the Coens would be able to exploit Tom Waits' foghorn on "Mother Machree" and Nelson's comic baritone, but the most memorable song is Brendan Gleeson's take on "The Unfortunate Lad", also known as "The Unfortunate Rake". This is foreshadowed in the opening by the use of the same tune most of us know as "The Streets of Laredo". The whole film is a foreshadowing, each vignette fading to black, a comic meditation on morality.

So what, some will carp. The satire is often on an SNL, Mad Magazine level, but at least provides amusement. Not many comedies do even that. The Coens' corpus falls just short of the Pantheon, but they have reached the far side of paradise with their finest work. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is middling fare from the brothers. "The Girl Who Got Rattled" ranks with their most memorable moments, the rest ranges from marvelous to mediocre. All in all. the film has enough behavioral, musical and pictorial beauties to commend it. (11/18/18)