A hand reaches down into the frame and flips the worn out, cloth-bound hardcover with the gold-embossed title “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” on the kind of book you discovered in your grandma’s attic, the kind you cradled in your arms, devouring the stories in a single sitting in one night page-by-page, leaving few memories of the characters or events, but filled with the excitement of adventures imagined and tragedies fantasized.
From the aforementioned ballad of title, to the hokey “The Gal Who Got Rattled” and the spookier “The Mortal Remains,” the Coen brothers are back to regale us with shows of wit and twists of plot. The stories are peopled, as one would only expect, with a gaggle of off-kilter versions of western stock characters—murderous cowboys, mad prospectors, naive virgins, vicious Comanche, self-righteous matrons, morose undertakers, beleaguered impresarios—inhabitants of a fantasyland that never existed anywhere but in the American imagination.
As each tall tale unfurls from book chapter into cinema scene, that selfsame hand descends again to turn the page once again, and reveal a chromatically resplendent plate to introduce each tale, an image pregnant with foreshadowing, expectant with mischief, upon the story about to be recounted: Who holds the full house in the game of poker? Who is the pan-bedecked man? And what does Mr. Arthur have to tell Billy?
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs opens with the eponymous character of the title role, with Tim Blake Nelson playing the happy-go-lucky “San Saba songbird,” as he likes to call himself, trotting happily through Monument Valley on his equally cheery steed Dan, song in his throat, whistle in his tooth, and of course, guns in his belt.
The gap-toothed singing gunslinger is a slight deviation on the nasty villain, in which with a deft twist of wrist, the aesthetics of the classic western are reversed, and black becomes white—and mean, polite. For Buster Scruggs is decked out in pure white like a chivalric knight, he is polite as all heck, never growls when he can sing, and his cheery disposition is as deadly as his aim.
Yet this overly ourteous gunslinger is meaner and quicker than any (well almost, as the tale will yet reveal). Quick enough, anyhow to beat out an angry armed menace while poor ol' Buster is caught unarmed, in what is certainly one of the funniest death-shot gags in the history of cinema (topped perhaps only by when John Travolta’s Vincent Vega accidentally blows poor Marvin’s face to smithereens in Pulp Fiction).
The true pleasures of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs come never from the plot (it is threadbare), nor the structure (there is little), but as always with the Coen brothers from the ambience created, the dialogues constructed, the characters imagined.
From James Franco’s luckless bank robber, who has the glory of being a man unlucky enough to be hung twice, to Liam’s Neeson’s morose Impresario, faced with a thorny personal dilemma, to the grizzled grouchy prospector of Tom Waits, confronted by a “weasely skunk,” each role filled feels like a bespoke casting, and each scene woven with its actor in mind.
Although the Coen brothers give due love and respect to each and every of their caricatural creations, they evidentially prefer their (usually male) tragicomic loners and ignorant dolts to the (often female) prim prude and proper pillars of —like the naïve Virgin Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) in the “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” or the self-righteous Matron in the final story, to whom they take boyish pleasure in giving their just comeuppance.
The final tale, “The Mortal Remains,” is both typical Coen fare, and an exemplification of the unlikely encounters between odd characters that they so love—five folk stuck together on a unstoppable coach in a sort horse-led huis clos (Sartre was perhaps never more right when he wrote “Hell is other people”).
Our five unlikely companions of voyage are obliged by proximity to address to one another, but are never able to come to any sort of understanding or communication. For the lives they have lived have been cut from far too divergent cloths. And so, the cynical French gambler who would buy love for a quarter can never comprehend the misplaced fidelity of the cuckolded Matron, who can only feel outrage at the scruffy trapper sinful union with his native (ex-)lover. And when our traveling band heatedly discusses (argues, in fact) the types of people in the world, they come to odds with one another. “There are those who are sinful and those who are holy,” insists the matron huffily. To which the trapper answers without any hint of irony “There’s only one type of people. And all people are ferrets.” Yet, it is perhaps only the two “bounty hunters” with their daily dealings at the end of a gun who have enough insight to posit that in fact the only types of people are two—the living and the dead.
The tales recounted in Ballad of Buster Scruggs are all second-degree, or third (or fourth). They are post-modern pastiches and ribaldish remixes, none taken too earnestly, a film about films, as the brothers so often do, a film which emanates not so much meaning, as it does ambience and imagination.
Each vignette in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is worth a chuckle or three, and the diverse little pictures don’t ultimately have much of a point other than pleasure, even taken together they remain little more than an assemblage of unconnected minuscule episodes, like a collection of illustrated plates from a book, like beads on a string.
Or perhaps there is a point. That one point which is ever inescapable. That one point which ends every single phrase and every single story: No matter who you are or what you think, we’re all gonna end up in the same old place anyhow. But along the way, as we ride in our coach to its terminus, you might as well have a good laugh or two. And if the joke is swell enough, you might just be lucky enough to get that great comedian Death to laugh along.