The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Dir: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, The Coen Brothers

2018

*****

A western-themed six part anthology film written, directed, and produced by the Coen brothers sounded like the stuff of rumour almost, like it was too good to be true. It is true, its real and its here but there was a niggle at the back of head when I first learned of it, even though I adore the Coen brothers and everything they’ve done. The thing is, they seem to reach their peak every nine years or so and then slump a little. Their first four films are all brilliant and they built up the fan following nicely. Miller’s Crossing really put them on the map but Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy – the two films that followed – didn’t do so well, even though they are two of my favorites and favorites of Coen fans. I loved everything they did up until Intolerable Cruelty and their remake of The Ladykillers, two films I merely liked but were no where near as masterful as their previous films. No Country For Old Men followed and it was a huge hit. Then they made Burn After Reading, which missed the mark, and while I liked A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis, neither felt like a true Coen film. True Grit was good but it was a western remake, I liked the Dude playing the Duke but again, it was no O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Hail Ceaser was something of a return to their early madcap style but as much as I liked it, it wasn’t quite the same. The film was also to be released on Netflix. Now I’m not hating on Netflix, I am a fan, but a Coen Brothers’ film should be seen on the big screen no? Frankly, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs got go one of two ways; either it would be a return to form incorporating everything that we loved about their previous films, or it would suck and mark the beginning of the end for the film making siblings. Thankfully, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a bloody masterpiece. The old America has always been kind to the brothers and setting is perfect. There are hints of Blood Simple, Miller’s crossing, Hudsucker Proxy, A Serious Man, True Grit and even Hail Ceaser. There is also a lovely slice of O Brother, Where Art Thou? in there for good measure. The cast are sublime and the characters are as vivid and quirky as you could ever hope for. The collection of six stories is classically presented as an old book with the title The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier. A hand turns the pages before and after each story, each one preceded by a colour plate illustration of a scene within the story. The first story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is everything you hoped the film would be within the first few seconds, although it isn’t necessarily the tone throughout the whole film. Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character, a cheerful singing cowboy clad in perfect white who travels atop his trusty white horse Dan. Buster introduces himself to the audience and gives them the lay of land. As he rides across the iconic Monument Valley, he explains to the audience that he is known as an outlaw and misanthrope, though he insists he harbors no dislike of his fellow man. He arrives at an isolated bar and asks for a whiskey, but the owner refuses him due to it being a dry county such that he'll only serve drinks to "proper" outlaws like the rough men sitting across the bar. The lead outlaw and Buster exchange insults before drawing their guns, Buster effortlessly shooting him between the eyes as well as mowing down the other outlaws and bar owner as they reach for their guns. He then heads into town and enters a saloon wherein, by house policy, he surrenders his guns at the door. He sits to join a game of poker that a player has suddenly left, but discovers this was because the man was dealt the infamous dead man's hand (two-pair of black aces and black eights), which the other players insist he still play now that he has peeked. When Buster refuses, a large menacing player named Joe (Clancy Brown) stands and draws a concealed pistol, the scene depicted in the color plate. Unable to dissuade Joe, Buster kicks down a plank in the table that seesaws up to instantaneously flip Joe's gun towards his own face and shoot him repeatedly. Buster then breaks into boisterous song about having to kill "Çurly Joe”, much to all the patrons' delight, until Joe's brother arrives in dismay and challenges Buster to a duel in the street. Buster gladly obliges and proceeds to shoot off each of the man's fingers before he can even draw, then finishes him off with his sixth bullet. However, a polite young man clad in black (Willie Watson) rides into town and recognizes Buster, having heard that he "is the one to beat" at both gunfighting and singing. Buster again happily obliges a request to duel, but much to his surprise, the young man is an even faster draw and shoots him straight through the middle of his forehead. Buster examines the wound in disbelief before collapsing, admitting via voiceover that he should have foreseen that "you can't be top dog forever." The young man and Buster then sing a bittersweet duet as Buster's spirit rises from his body and floats towards heaven complete with angel wings and a lyre. The breaking of the forth wall, narration, singing and dancing are all classic Coen, but I have to say the level of violence, although rather comedic, was surprising but welcome. The second story, called Near Algodones, should have been called Unlucky Luke in my opinion. James Franco plays a young cowboy who cautiously enters a bank that stands isolated upon the prairie. After a brief but hilarious chat with the jabbering bank teller (the brilliant Stephen ‘Where’s my stapler?’ Root, draws his pistol to rob him. However, when he allows the teller to stoop to reach the "large denominations," the teller instead fires a row of shotguns mounted below the counter, which the cowboy leaps to avoid whilst the teller escapes into the back. After filling his bag with cash from the drawer, the cowboy flees out the front, but the teller fires after him, causing him to hide for cover behind a well. As depicted in the story's color plate, the teller then charges the cowboy wearing a washboard and several pots and pans that deflect all the cowboy's shots as the teller repeatedly cackles "Panshot!" The teller knocks the cowboy out with his rifle butt, and when the cowboy regains consciousness, he is sitting upon a horse under a tree with a noose around his neck and being asked for his final words by a lawman and his posse who have already convicted and sentenced him to death while he was unconscious. He is assured it was a fair trial. The execution is then suddenly interrupted by ambushing Comanche warriors who quickly slaughter the lawman and posse but leave the cowboy in place upon the horse. After a time, a drover happens by and frees the cowboy, who then joins him on his drive. However, the drover is actually a rustler, and they are promptly chased down by another lawman's posse, who capture and march the cowboy into town where the sheriff summarily orders him to hang. As the cowboy stands upon the gallows with three other men awaiting execution, one of his fellow condemned begins to sob and wail. The cowboy's dry response offers the story a punchline: "First time?" He then spots a beautiful young woman in the crowd and mutters "There's a pretty girl" before the hangman abruptly hoods him and pulls the lever to cheers and applause. The first story was both what the audience wanted and something unexpected, while the second was rather wry with funny bits. The whole ‘you can’t escape your fate’ idea is simple but effective and the lawlessness of the old west is beautifully highlighted. Meal Ticket, the third of the six stories, takes the anthology to darker territory. An aging impresario (Liam Neeson) and his artist Harrison (Harry Melling), a young man with no arms or legs, travel from town to town in a wagon that converts into a small stage where Harrison theatrically recites classics such as Shelley's poem "Ozymandias", the biblical story of Cain and Abel, works by Shakespeare, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The impresario collects money from the audience at the end of each performance, with profits dwindling as they visit increasingly remote mountain towns with smaller and more indifferent audiences. Our impresario grows weary and callous from performing all the physical labor in the endeavor as well as having to feed, dress, and assist Harrison in relieving himself. Their financial situation is never desperate, as the impresario can afford to visit a prostitute (keeping Harrison present but facing away), and later draws from a large roll of dollar bills in his coat to buy a chicken of unusual talent in hopes of supplanting Harrison's performances. The impresario observes a man drawing a crowd with the chicken, which can ostensibly perform basic math, pecking at the correct numeric answers to addition and subtraction equations that the audience calls out. After buying the chicken, as the impresario drives their wagon through a mountain pass, he stops by a bridge over a rushing river. He walks to the center of the bridge and drops a large stone into the river to gauge its depths before returning to the wagon wearing a faint smile. The film then cuts to the story's final scene in which he has resumed driving the wagon, the chicken his only passenger and Harrison presumably dropped into the river, as foreshadowed by the quote from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice that captioned the color plate illustration of Harrison: "The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven." Harrison, superbly performed by Harry Melling, is a Coen creation through and through and maybe their best character in the last decade. The bleakness of this story shows the hardship of the era but the darkness of the story show both the greed and desperation of the ‘survivor’. At this point we learn that this is no ordinary Coen production and although there are hints of their previous work, this is something new and exciting. All Gold Canyon is the great one-man show of the anthology. The old and grizzly Tom Waits plays a prospector who arrives in a pristine mountain valley with his trusty donkey in tow. In the grassy meadow beside a stream that snakes through the valley, the prospector begins digging soil samples and panning through them in the stream to count the gold specks and thereby slowly determine the area with the highest concentration and possibly a major gold deposit, which he calls "Mr. Pocket." After his first night camping at the site, he catches a fish for his breakfast, and then spots a Great Horned Owl tending its treetop nest at the edge of the valley. As depicted in the color plate, he climbs the pine tree that holds the nest, but pauses mid-climb to look out at the vast expanse of wilderness - "And in all that mighty sweep of earth he saw no sign of man nor the handiwork of man." When he reaches the nest, the mother owl's watchful gaze from a nearby tree dissuades the prospector from stealing more than one egg for his meal. After digging several more soil sample holes that day, he identifies Mr. Pocket's location and begins digging a larger hole. The next morning, he digs out gold chunks of increasing size before finally reaching Mr. Pocket: a large gold vein running through the quartz rock. But no sooner does he make his discovery than a shadow falls over him; a young man (Sam Dillon) has snuck to the edge of the hole and shoots him in the back. However, the bullet passes through the prospector without striking any vital organs, and when the young man jumps into the hole to steal the gold, the prospector stops playing dead, knocks the man down, wrestles his gun away, and shoots him in the face. The prospector then assesses and cleans his wound in the stream, finishes digging the gold from the hole, pushes the young man's body back into the hole to serve as his grave, and departs the valley with his bounty. At this point the viewer has been lead to believe that there isn’t much justice in frontier America so it looked as if our gold digger might have had it, so it was nice that the typical lawlessness was shown but with a happy ending. Again, the conclusion is expected and unexpected at the same time. The penultimate story could have probably been a film in its own right. This is the most un-Coen feeling film, although the characters are definitely theirs. The Gal Who Got Rattled follows a young woman named Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) and her inept businessman brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays), who are journeying in a wagon train across the prairie towards Oregon, where Gilbert claims a new business partner will marry his sister. Gilbert dies quite suddenly of cholera shortly after they embark, and the wagon train's leaders, Mr. Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines), help Alice bury her brother. Though she has no certain prospects, Alice decides to continue to Oregon rather than return east. However, the young man Gilbert hired to lead their wagon, Matt, is demanding half the $400 he claims Gilbert promised him, and Alice cannot find Gilbert's money, fearing he was buried with it. Alice conveys her predicament to Billy, who offers his support in contemplating how to proceed, and also does her the favour of driving off Gilbert's small dog, President Pierce, whose incessant barking has drawn widespread complaint. He promised to kill the dog to put it down kindly but it gets away and it isn’t clear whether this was by mistake or by his kindness and gentle nature. Through the course of their conversations, Billy grows fond of Alice, and he ultimately proposes to solve her dilemma by marrying her in Fort Laramie, assuming Gilbert's debt to pay Matt, and retiring from leading wagon trains to build a home and family with her upon 640 acres in Oregon per the Homestead Act. Alice is surprised by Billy's proposal, but she has likewise grown fond of him, so she accepts the next morning, and Billy informs Mr. Arthur that this will be their last ride together. The following morning, Mr. Arthur notices Alice missing, and he rides over the hills to eventually find her laughing at some prairie dogs with President Pierce. Mr. Arthur then spots an indian sentinel and advancing war party, and he gives Alice a pistol to shoot herself in the event he is killed so that she can avoid capture. Mr. Arthur twice drives back the charging warriors with his rifle, but when a remaining warrior momentarily appears to kill Mr. Arthur, Alice shoots herself as instructed. As depicted in the color plate, Mr. Arthur sadly walks back to the wagon train with "no idea what he would say to Billy Knapp." The film is full of the dark and comically tragic, but the conclusion of this story is just plain tragic. Once more it covers a lot of history within a short time and again shows that life wasn’t easy at that time but it also shows the kindness of others, for the first and only time in the whole film. The final film is an odd one, although I think it was brilliant to end with a tale so ambiguous and strange. The Mortal Remains sees five people as they share stagecoach together at sunset to Fort Morgan. The five are singing Englishman Thigpen (Jonjo O’Neill), Irishman Clarence (Brendan Gleeson);  Frenchman René (Saul Rubinek); a Lady Mrs. Betjeman (Tyne Daly) and a Trapper (Chelcie Ross). Thigpen says that he and Clarence often travel this route "ferrying cargo," alluding to a corpse on the roof, but he does not yet specify the nature of their business handling corpses. The Trapper rambles about his past relationship with a Native woman in which neither knew the other's language, but his observing her basic emotions led him to conclude that "people are like ferrets or beaver, all pretty much alike" in their animal needs and desires. Mrs. Betjeman, a devout Christian, indignantly rebuts that there are two kinds of people, upright and sinning, and explains that her husband, from whom she's been separated for three years, is a retired lecturer on "moral and spiritual hygiene." René challenges her dichotomy (and the Trapper's argument of simplistic animalism) with reflections on the innately individual and complex subjectivity of human experience, and then questions whether her husband conceives of love the same way she does and has remained faithful to her. Mrs. Betjamen becomes apoplectic, and René calls out the window for the coachman to stop, but as foretold in the color plate, "Whether or not he heard, the coachman did not slow." Thigpen clarifies that never stopping is policy. Clarence sings a bittersweet folk song to calm the group, and he and Thigpen then reveal themselves to be reapers (bounty hunters). Thigpen explains how he distracts their prey with stories while Clarence "thumps" them. He tells them of how he distracted Mr. Thorpe, the corpse on the roof, with the story of The Midnight Caller, and how he enjoys watching their prey die, the expression in their eyes as they "negotiate the passage" and "try to make sense of it." The other three are visibly unsettled by this as they arrive at the foreboding hotel in Fort Morgan where they will all be staying, and they remain in the stagecoach while Thigpen and Clarence carry the corpse into the hotel. As they then warily make their way inside, René lingers in the doorway to watch the stagecoach ride off into the eerily foggy night. He then turns to face whatever fate awaits within, dons his hat, and closes the heavy double doors behind him. It’s a wonderful eerie mystery, driven by wonderful character performances and a killer script. One of the reasons that the film feels both fresh and old school Coen is because all of the Western-themed short stories have been written by the Coens over a period of 20 to 25 years. All Gold Canyon was based on a Jack London story and The Gal Who Got Rattled was inspired by a story by Stewart Edward White and based in part on contemporaneous accounts, including those of heated arguments over pets. From the outset, the Coens ruled out traditional film studio funding, seeing an industry shift in how smaller projects are financed. Joel Coen said that Netflix was investing in movies that aren’t based on Marvel comics or other established action franchises, "which is pretty much the business of the studios now." The filmmakers have made clear that they had mixed feelings regarding distribution as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs had only a limited theatrical run before its Netflix streaming debut. The Coens credited home videos with helping establish their own careers and admitted that they themselves succumbed to the temptation to watch movies at home rather than going out to a theatre but the "hours and days and years you spend struggling over details" of a film "is appreciated in a different way on a big screen," Joel Coen said. I don’t think cinema is dead, but it is certainly on the decline. That said, when companies like Netflix are investing and producing brilliant films and television shows the art is certainly alive and well. Everything about the film is perfect; the direction, cinematography, characters, writing, dialogue, performance…but more than that, the mood and themes manage to change while still remaining entwined. It is the return to form that I’d hoped for but also the Coens’ as they’ve matured. It’s one of the best things they’ve ever done and better than most things that have appeared on the big screen the same year. I’m a very happy Coen fan right now.