Review: The Coens Combine Anthology Short Films with the Wild West in ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’
This review was originally published for UW Film Club and has since been republished here with the author’s permission.
Of recent, Netflix has been snagging up auteurs left and right to produce content for them. In the past, it included the likes of Cary Fukunaga, Noah Bombach, and Dee Rees, but this year, they brought out the big canons. In the hopes of vying for Oscar nominations that can convert to Oscar wins, they scoped up Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma(which has a very good chance of winning it all), and, the subject of our discussion, the Coen Brother’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
What was originally supposed to be a six part mini series produced for the platform has now congealed into a single, two and a quarter hour length feature film that is structurally different than any other Coen project before. Discontinuous and unconnected, these six individual stories depict six vignettes set in the Wild West that are as unique as they are diverse. What is particularly interesting is the Coens’ interest in playing with form to check all the boxes of tropes found in Westerns. Not a rehash of older films, but rather an introspective of the genre itself. In many ways, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a quintessential Western. By using six individual stories, the Coens can engage in a dialog with genre scenarios, allowing them to play with a variety of tropes that wouldn’t work in a single unified narrative in order to set the back drop for six moral tales.
The first film deals with the titular Buster Scruggs (Tim Nelson), a cartoonish outlaw who roams the west carrying out astonishing acts of gunslinging prowess. The second short, “Near Algodones”, follows a nameless cowboy (James Franco) who after a failed bank robbery keeps narrowly avoiding death in fateful ways. The third, “Meal Ticket,” follows a pair of traveling showmen (Liam Neeson and Harry Melling) who find dwindling success in their show of intellectual poetry, and must find a new way to make money. The fourth , “All Gold Canyon”, finds a prospector searching for an elusive gold vein on the back of his own hard labor. The fifth, “The Gal that Got Rattled”, sees a young girl (Zoe Kazan) moving out west on the Oregon Trail, but who encounters hardships when her brother dies along the way and must now find $200 to pay the debts of her sibling. The last short, “The Mortal Remains,” depicts a wagon of travelers headed to a hotel for the night, but as they talk with one another, they slowly become aware of something supernatural at play .
Versatile, diverse, and lucid, these six shorts work well within the conventions of a Western, but are still strong enough on their own to convey six unique messages in very economical packages. It would appear as if the Coens have a deep seeded love for the western and wanted to speak to the variety of the genre. Cowboys, bank robberies, stake claimers, gold miners, horse back riding, stage coaches, shoot outs, standoffs, carnie shows, open plaines, grizzled law men, and a plethora of other western conventions are all represented in this film. It is jammed pack with all the tropes, iconography, and characteristics you know about westerns, but packaged in a way that isn’t a rehash. The Coens are consciously aware that these notions exist, but they are using them as an aesthetic to tell their six morals. It’s a picturesque rendition of the wild west that is all encapsulating in its pursuit of capturing the western genre that may not be possible (or inherently very messy) in a single story. In that sense, the completeness and breadth of Western tropes makes this film an almanac of the genre. (Note: Included in these tropes is the savagery depiction of Native Americans. See here for more on that trope in a social context.)
After thirty years into filmmaking, it is interesting to see the Coens play with form and structure like they are doing here. Framed as six stories in one book, these vignettes are only connected via the turning of a page. ‘Divided but connected’ is important here. Collectively, they all embrace the western genre, but their narrative division enables different modes of style that are accompanied by varied thematic morals. The first film is an exercise of excess, cartoonish behavior, and humor inside of a swagger filled cowboy. The second film is about the inevitability of fate inside the frame of an outlaw bank robber. The third film is a commentary on the state of entertainment told via a traveling sideshow. The fourth is a take on the value of hard work and what is earned through the story of a prospector. The Western lens is a backdrop so to speak. For the Coens, they could have told these six tales in a different setting or form, but they chose not to; there is a benefit to the anthology form factor that gave them more flexibility with the scenarios they present and it’s all the better for it. Imagine the cartoonish nature of the first story combined with the supernatural parts of the last one. It wouldn’t work, but since the stories are independent of each other, the Coens can do more narratively and thematically.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a wonderful portrait of the Western genre. Within its six part structure, the Coens can play in sandbox of the wild west, leveraging its best parts and using them to tell six beautifully rendered stories. Don’t let the Netflix logo fool you: this is assuredly a theatrical film well worth your time. The only problem is finding it in the deluge of Netflix’s content on their platform.