“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”
The Couch Potato’s Guide to Home Viewing finds itself in a unique position to help our friends make good viewing choices during this time of mandatory seclusion. Our critics will be reviewing film and television programs available to you at home, programs chosen for their artistic and entertainment value.
We’ll be selecting programs from a wide range: vintage cinema and television, streaming media, comedy, drama, limited series, independent films, foreign films, and mainstream movies. We cover all the genres: horror, sci-fi, drama, romantic comedy, slapstick comedy, family movies, social drama, and the ubiquitous zombie apocalypse. We can give you the skinny on the actors, the actresses, the supporting actors and actresses, the directors, and even (God knows why) the writers. We know the liveliest art. And we also love to stay home.
One frequently overlooked area of the home viewing experience is—home. What makes the home viewing experience different from going to the local AMC or independent theater? Comfort, of course. You can view a film in your pajamas, curled up with that special someone, or with an unlimited quantity of the beverage of your choice close at hand.
Then there’s the control of watching in your own home. You can stop viewing at any time for a bathroom break or to take that call from work or to make yourself a sandwich. You can replay that gripping scene over and over (i.e. the bulletin board pan in The Usual Suspects or Brad’s fantasy sequence in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), or—of course—binge to your little heart’s content. Six hours, eight hours, ten hours, or more, it’s completely up to you. We will provide that unique homebound perspective for your consideration.
So, with that, we’ll delve into our first film recommendation, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western—although it’s probably unlike any Western you’ve seen. Written and directed by the Coen brothers, who brought us off-beat classics like Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Barton Fink, and The Big Lebowski, this particular film is a anthology of six fables about the Old West and which are stories which turn seamlessly from the humorous to the sublime. It’s not your usual Hollywood fare, but it is definitely entertaining and sometimes quite surprising. Read the review; if you think this is your cup of tea, go ahead and curl up, hit the remote, and enjoy.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Found on Netflix
Starring: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, and Stephen Root.
Written and Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
“Here’s a Tale To Tell”
Movie Review of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
by Geoff Carter
A singing cowboy, a zealous bank teller and his outlaw customer, a grizzled prospector, and a stagecoach bound for parts unknown are just some of the eccentrics that populate the Coen Brothers’ film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a tip of the hat to the archetypes and icons of the American Western.
Scruggs is an anthology of six unrelated Western fables introduced as a hardcover book in the title sequence. Each individual story in the volume is introduced with an old-style color art plate, the image perhaps bridging the narrative gap between film and literature.
Buster Scruggs is by turns hilarious, gruesome, shocking, poignant, and beautiful; Ethan Coen’s screenplay is an absolute gem, his characters by turns awkwardly verbose or eloquent in their silence. Buster Scruggs, played by Tim Blake Nelson, is so painfully articulate that his speech—along with his garb—causes bystanders to gape as if watching an accident. An old prospector, played by Tom Waits, talks only to anything: mountains, an owl, his mule, and himself, his grizzled voice like a strip of rawhide left out in the sun too long. As a wilderness impresario, Liam Neeson is as expressive in his silence as his actor is in his oratory.
Six archetypal western narratives are represented in this film: the singing cowboy (gunslinger) a la Destry Rides Again, the outlaw getting his comeuppance, the traveling thespians bringing culture to the wild west, the wagon train dragging civilization with it to Oregon, and the prospector in search of a dream, and a stagecoach filled with a cross-section of contrasts: trapper, Frenchman, bounty hunters, and a self-righteous religious zealot. Each story is a unique take on the audience’s preconceptions of the old West and our expectations from the genre, but not our expectations from a Coen Brothers film. There are continual visual surprises, plot twists, and splashes of black humor.
One of the realities that the traditional Hollywood western refused to face was the violence of the wilderness culture. Massacres, slaughter, gunfights, and hangings were depicted in movies as relatively bloodless affairs. People fell off their horses and collapsed in the dusty streets of Tombstone, but there was no gushing blood or broken heads or piled bodies. In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the filmmakers have chosen not to pull these punches; there is graphic violence nearly from beginning to end.
The traditional vision of the Western frontier resonates with the rugged individual, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the American vision of manifest destiny. While we see all these elements in the films of John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda, what we rarely see in the Hollywood version is the violence that made this vision possible. The Coen Brothers have supplied this ingredient to the traditional formula.
The acting in this film is superb. Tim Blake Nelson is psychotically goofy as the titular character, while Zoe Kazan turns in a wonderfully understated performance as an indecisive young woman stranded on a wagon train. Tom Waits is perfectly cast as an eccentric old prospector, a man comfortable enough in nature to talk to it. Stephen Root is wildly enthusiastic as the proprietor of a small bank, a man on a mission, while Liam Neeson is by turns patient and ruthless as the proprietor of a traveling roadshow. James Franco, Henry Melling, Tyne Daily, and Bill Heck also shine.
While the stories turn from tragedy to comedy to the absurd, the final stagecoach segment remains a bit of a cypher; it seems an odd fit with the rest of the anthology. What starts out as a seemingly simple journey to Fort Morgan for the five passengers turns into a parable for something far more sinister, a journey reminiscent, to me at least, of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, a parable for the last ride we all must take. The conversation in the coach turns from the nature of human relationships to the nature of life and death to the innermost workings of the human heart. And the journey ends where all journeys end.
I thoroughly enjoyed this film and since it is streaming on Netflix, I will probably watch it again. And probably once more after that. This movie is not only great entertainment, but these tales resonate. They are compassionate, heartless, absurd, brutal, desperate, and funny.
As the bounty hunter (the Englishman) in the stagecoach says,
“You know the story, but people can’t get enough of them, like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially.”