Buster is infectiously blithe, rousingly virtuosic with a revolver, and a pure psychopath, although his sickness can be attributed to the Western genre as a whole. Tim Blake Nelson is the singing sharpshooter who talks to the audience, frequently praising his own “pleasing baritone.” You get delightfully well-staged saloon dance numbers side-by-side with indiscriminate carnage. With hindsight, the jolly first story - “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” - lays out the Coens’ vision. Different on the surface, they’re philosophically all of a piece. Now I think the Coens were dead right in their approach. Sometimes it’s good to let things sit and not rush to judgment.
#THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS MOVIE#
I confess that on leaving the screening I was disappointed - but affected enough that I continued to take the movie apart in my head. The sixth is on its own weird, cosmic plateau. The fourth is lighter, though it leaves a bitter taste, and the fifth is simply crushing. The third is a steep drop into icy waters. The first two are crammed with bloody deaths but giddy and absurdist - they give you a high. The stories are jarringly different in tone - so different that they left early festival audiences puzzled. It’s an omnibus film: six short Old West tales broken only by that corny old cliché - the pages of a book being turned. The Coens’ newest Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their bleakest work of all, and one of their richest. As in Charles Portis’s novel, a girl’s obsession with revenge ends up maiming her (literally and metaphorically) for life: Her universe violently contracts with the shot that kills her father’s murderer. I was shortsighted.) Their next Western, a remake of True Grit, was superficially similar to Henry Hathaway’s version with John Wayne, but the denouement made all the difference.
(At the time, this annoyed me - I wanted the conventional consolations of genre. Taking their cues from Cormac McCarthy, their modern Western No Country for Old Men spared no one, good or evil, and offered no catharsis. Gradually, though, macabre farce has yielded to tragedy.
Nowadays, that cynicism remains intact: On the evidence, the Coens believe that we are ruled by a self-interest that blinds us to the consequences of our actions and that God, if He exists, can be counted on to show no mercy. This is not to take away from The Big Lebowski, the best stoner comedy of all time, or a handful of other superb entertainments. Their characters were puppets of a prankster God who dispatched human beings without feeling - a lack of emotion shared by most audiences, who felt little more than admiration for the brothers and maybe for themselves, for getting the in-jokes. For decades, it was easy to undervalue Joel and Ethan Coen - not their droll, hyper-literate dialogue or knowing use of old movie tropes, or talent for pinpointing the core eccentricity in a given actor and making it seem hip, even blessed.
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