The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The greatest feeling that occupied my mind while watching the Coen brothers' new anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was a sense of comfort. I felt, to put it simply, charmed by the storytelling, in a way that I feel most high-profile films today (even the really good ones) don't often achieve. This wasn't because the stories are particularly charming or comforting (for the most part, the opposite was true), but because getting to see two masters of their craft return to the basics of storytelling was simply a delight.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology film: a collection of short films strung together by some unifying thread—in this case, a 19th-century American West setting. To my surprise, none of the stories are connected by characters or events. There are probably innumerable subtextual links you could draw between them all, but within the logic of the stories themselves, they are entirely disparate. In order, the stories are as follows:
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Tim Blake Nelson stars as Buster, a deceptively goofy and simple-minded gunslinger who makes his way through a podunk desert town, leaving confusion and sudden death in his wake as he sings songs of life as an outlaw.
Near Algodones: James Franco is an unseasoned bank robber who gets in over his head, and faces much higher consequence than he expected.
Meal Ticket: Liam Neeson is a quiet, wagon-toting impresario whose main attraction is a legless, armless orator, played by Harry Melling.
All Gold Canyon: an old-but-fiery prospector (Tom Waits) strikes what he thinks might be an untapped pocket of gold in a secluded mountain valley.
The Gal Who Got Rattled: Zoe Kazan is a young woman who leaves behind her family to seek a potential courter at the other end of the Oregon Trail.
The Mortal Remains: Tyne Daly and Brendan Gleeson are two of five misfit strangers traveling together by carriage on an eerie night.
Similar to watching a great golfer sink a simple putt, or an all-star basketball player toss in a graceful layup, watching the damn Coen brothers tell simple, short stories, after years of impressing us with big, bold, weird, and crazy feature films—many of which have garnered tons of awards attention—is both enchanting and satisfying. Short-form filmmaking has very little mainstream or commercial appeal these days, the same way a well-executed layup isn't at the top of ESPN's highlight reels. I imagine it difficult to sell the idea of a short film, or even a collection of short films, seeing as most moviegoers, when purchasing a ticket, expect to have a "full" experience; that is, two hours of bonding with one or perhaps a few characters and watching them go on an adventure. Short films, at least in the commercial world, are typically pegged as opening acts for the larger, longer film that everyone is there to see; the "feature" film. People just aren't really used to the idea of only spending ten minutes with a character—just long enough to witness one moment in his or her life—and then moving on. I must admit, as I was settling in to Ballad, even I was having some difficulty adjusting to the disconnected, episodic nature of each chapter.
But generally, I find (as I found again in Ballad) that short films have a sort of hit-and-run sense of impact that a longer, more drawn-out and context-heavy film would lack. There's an old joke that the shortest scary story in the world goes something like this: "The last man in the world sits alone in a room. He hears a knock on the door." There's something about that simple ambiguity—the requirement that we, as the viewer, fill in the gaps in our head—that makes a story so memorable and enticing. In the case of this particular set of stories, Near Algodones, Meal Ticket, and The Mortal Remains are the premier examples of this flash-in-the-pan method of yarn-spinning. Near Algodones plays essentially as a bleak, dry comedy, with the most stylish and fully realized aesthetic of all. Meal Ticket presents the most gothic, demented subject and tone out of the lot, and will probably be the one that sticks with me the longest. The Mortal Remains almost seems to ride a line between the other two, treating its characters as goofball caricatures as they deal with rather morbid circumstances. Remains is also notably the most abstract of the six stories, perhaps taking place not entirely within the mortal realm, depending on one's interpretation.
Of course, not every short story has to be totally devoid of context to work; not all of Ballad's stories are that way, or not exactly. On the other side of the coin, a short story can very much have its own beginning, middle, and end, as the Coen's demonstrate in their fifth of six short stories, The Gal What Got Rattled. Zoe Kazan, Bill Heck, and Grainger Hines give some of the collection's best performances in this longest chapter, which is also the collection's most dynamic and wide-ranging story, in terms of tone and series of events. It feels the most like a "western" to me, with its stripped-down cowboy characters and the pressing on along the Oregon trail as the driver for the plot.
All Gold Canyon lands somewhere between the brief observations of the first three I described and the more typical narrative structure of The Gal Who Got Rattled. Tom Waits gives my favorite performance in the collection, as a lovable, weary old man determined to find gold after what seems to be a lifetime of disappointment and failure to get rich. The longer he digs for gold, the more the prospector anthropomorphizes the alleged pocket of gold in the valley, calling it "Mr. Pocket" and promising, as though he were its caretaker, that he's coming to find it. It's also the only story in the series that feels genuinely happy.
But it's the anthology's opening chapter that doesn't seem to quite work for me. Titled the same as the total collection, the first chapter plays like a black musical comedy. I did enjoy Nelson's lead performance as the nutty outlaw, as well as Clancy Brown's as the cranky Curly Joe. But the bland visual style and cheap production design contrast with the stylish dialogue and charming folk music, and the ending feels unrewarding because, while kind of fun to watch, Buster isn't much of a magnet for empathy or even real interest in his character.
Regardless, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a filmmaking exercise well-worth watching. It also makes for relatively easy watching, as the stories pass you buy, for the most part, in about twenty minutes. Personally, Ballad makes me long for more anthology films from other great directors; I'd be especially interested to see what little stories David Fincher or Denis Villeneuve might have up their sleeves. Hopefully, this marks a slow return of great filmmakers telling short stories in a more mainstream setting. For now, that platform is Netflix. Give this one a watch when it's available on Nov. 16.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2PyxzSH1HM&w=535