Miller’s Crossing (1990), Fargo (1996) a personal favourite, The Big Lebowski (1998), No Country for Old Men (2007), True Grit (2010) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).
Can you guess who we are talking about? With violence playing a small role in but a few of the Coen Brother’s box office hits, it will come as no surprise that their latest Wild West themed short story collection The Ballad of Buster Scruggs features more than one or two gun wielding outlaws popping holes in each others ego’s and their bodies (I mean what is a Coen Brother’s film without it?).
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is in fact presented as a prefigured anthology of short Wild West stories not to dissimilar to those that we grow up reading and immersing ourselves in as children. A classical book worth owning if it really did exist, the beautiful, delicate lithography turns with each page through the gentle caress of a hand and our movie begins. Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) himself appears to be the titular character of our first tale, gleefully singing about ‘Cool, Clear Water’ on his way across canyons and valleys. Safe to say, this character and the events that unravel during his episode, firmly set the tone for the entire film. The subsequent characters bring their own exceptionally engaging stories to life – James Franco portraying a less than talented Bank Robber blessed with relatively good yet cheap fortune when faced with peril – Liam Neeson journeys from town to town, putting on travelling show consisting of a no-limb thespian in the shape of Tom Melling, who delivers passionate recitals of famous speeches and Shakespearean monologues to crowds en mass until business begins to run dry. Tom Waits plays a gold prospector who finds himself in battle with a follower and nature after discovering a great hoard, before Zoe Kazan picks up a more heart rendering segment in which a wagon train journeys to Oregon and a moonlit stagecoach ride closes the show.
Coen brothers have notoriously been hit and miss, with the 2016 satirical Hollywood flick Hail Caesar reinforcing this, but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs truly acts as a complete personification of what we have come to expect from all kinds of CB work. All six stories present their own moral conflicts and toils that question the nature of humanity and the world around us. The first ten minutes of the film are cinema gold, with Buster Scruggs proving to be a legendary character that could honestly carry a two hour feature film on his own. Waits’ gold miner arrives at a gorgeous, picturesque and animal paradise in his search for plunder, but leaves devastation behind once his work is finished, leaving a clear resonating message as the chapter closes. Death is no stranger, yet is timely dispersed throughout each segment, allowing suitable character development before a climactic (or not so) conclusion in which a characters passing seems a fitting and suitable end.
Visually, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a delight, with stunning (seriously… masterful) cinematic landscapes blemished with hues of all kinds creating a sentimental lens for the audience to watch through. The viewer is immersed into a world as authentic as realistically possible, an aspect that also assists in the connectivity through the screen to each character. Aided by a intricately written soundtrack, each story presents its own themes and songs that create a unique idiosyncrasy to its characters and story line. The Coen Brother’s do need to be careful not to become a parody of themselves through their work, accentuating the model structures and themes that made their biggest hits the behemoths they are, but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs just about rides that lines of overplay to the extent that the satirical plausibility of its constructs are just about acceptable.
QTAS RATING: 7/10
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