The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) – J. Coen & E. Coen

In their latest feature, available only through Netflix (?), the Coen Brothers have put together six short stories set in the (stereotypical, fabled) Old West.  The situations may be familiar but the Coens really seem to be working to generate a particular emotion, one of those complex emotions that you can’t quite put your finger on – is it wryness? There is some humour here (often broad, violent, absurd) but there is also death.  Deaths come unexpectedly, at the wrong moments, ironically -- and when they are escaped, they still come.   Each story begins with its first page (in a book of stories) and also closes with a look at the final page – and a quick reader can catch the trailing words that help to fully capture that emotion. For example, “Mr Arthur didn’t know what he was going to say to Billy Knapp” (or something similar) ends the fifth story (about a wagon train) which contains the longest build until the “punchline”.  In most of the stories, we are left to imagine what happens next.  This isn’t a film to make you laugh aloud (although there were some funny bits, particularly in the first story, about a singing gunslinger, that lends the film its title) but it contains that typical offbeat humour, wordplay/turns of phrase, eccentric character actors, and spot on art direction that makes the Coen Bros’ films fun.  They also make good use of Tom Waits (as an old prospector in a tale drawn from Jack London!) and also Zoe Kazan, Liam Neeson, James Franco and Tyne Daly.  But it is the vein of darkness that the Coens stitch into these stories that elevates them; it is the presence of death, life’s eternal partner, treated absurdly but always accepted. Perhaps there are some philosophical (or even political) points nested in these stories, but the casual viewer need not worry about them.  Instead, it is enough to know that these master alchemists have done their best to conjure up a very human feeling, okay let’s call it an “existential” feeling.  And it feels alright.