Our senses are pumped, but the next episode, unfortunately, is the weakest of the lot. Where can the Coens go from here? As it turns out, they can only get more down to earth, but that first episode establishes the film’s running fixation: It will be all about the act of killing, and the act of dying. The episode is pretty funny, and if nothing else it’s an original: the first (and probably last) cowboy splatter musical. At a poker game, the violence gets more hilariously extreme, but through it all Nelson just keeps smiling, and singing. The joke, of course, is that Nelson, with his hayseed mugging, looks like the most harmless yokel imaginable. Within minutes, he has shot everyone to death with the speed of a superhero.
#BUSTER SCRUGGS CAST FULL#
The first episode, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” is the most insanely violent, because it’s pure six-shooter burlesque: an over-the-top satire of the chutzpah of Western heroism, with Tim Blake Nelson, all wholesome grins and drawling cracker-barrel verbiage, as Buster, a singing cowboy in white Roy Rogers duds who rides through Monument Valley and then comes to a bar full of outlaws that refuses to serve him whiskey. Maybe the reason the Coens get away with this is that the film doesn’t portray the Indians as villains.
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No, not Native Americans but old-fashioned Hollywood war-painted Injuns who exist in the movie for no other reason than to come charging out of the horizon with lightning savagery. The Coens go back to the classical Western tropes and clichés: spurs and campfires and wagon trains, bars full of dirty bearded poker-playing varmints, shoot-outs at high noon, old-man prospectors, and - yes - Indians.
There’s nothing revisionist about any of it. The film’s conceit is that it’s bringing to life a dusty old book of Western stories, each represented by a painted illustration that evokes the children’s books of the ‘40s and ’50s. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is a pop fantasia that’s interested in the meaning of what a brutal place the Old West really was. If that sounds like a vintage Coen vision, or maybe a vintage Coen joke, it is, but the Coens have always made death into a semi-philosophical jape. In “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” life is nasty, brutish, and short, even for a number of the protagonists the film’s signature motif is people getting killed with one clean shot through the forehead. Not something major, but a theme with a pinch of resonance. More than that, the episodes are linked by a scabrous obsession with death that, in the end, adds up to something. It’s full of majestic wilderness imagery that pops on screen (Monument Valley has rarely looked this otherworldly in its grandeur, and there are green mountain vistas so pristine you want to go back in time and live there). Yet “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie.
The movie runs 135 minutes, and since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing.
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If you were going to be cynical about it, you might say “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is still a Netflix series - it’s just one that the Coens are forcing you to binge-watch. Its writer-directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, decided instead to jam the episodes - violent, picturesque, cornball mythic tales of the Old West - into one feature-length anthology film. “ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” was originally conceived and shot as a six-episode series for Netflix.
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