Waits’ segment is also a particular highlight, practically a one-man show as he digs around an Edenic valley panning for gold and grumbling to his quarry. Some of the segments number among the best stuff the Coens have done Buster Scruggs, for instance, is an uproariously goofy sendup of the Singing Cowboy genre they already lampooned in Hail, Caesar!, Nelson’s gormless gunslinger a deliciously watchable protagonist as he sings and shoots his way through a cartoonish version of the Old West. Strikes and Gutters: While the Coens are some of mainstream cinema’s most acclaimed filmmakers, they’re not immune to the occasional misstep, and Buster Scruggs’ nature as an anthology is a perfect microcosm of their career’s quality.
Virtue matters little: Kazan’s kind, innocent Alice Longbaugh is just as doomed as Franco’s hapless outlaw. As is prototypical of the Coens, each hero struggles against the unfeeling, uncaring world of the frontier – circumstances toss them from one predicament to another, characters moving (or being transported) inexorably toward their fates in myriad ways. None of the vignettes are diegetically connected, but all are collected in a hard-bound book an unidentified hand (the hand of fate, perhaps?) flips through between each segment, like the framing device of an old Disney movie. In this respect, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs feels like the Coens dabbling in this winking moral nihilism in a more scattershot fashion. Their darkly comic explorations of ordinary and extraordinary undone by fate has a perfect backdrop amidst the tall, flat mountains of Arizona and the plains of Nevada, the lawlessness of the Old West filled in by the caprices of Mother Nature and man’s inhumanity of man. After all, many of their other works have the feel of a Western – the outlaw sensibilities of Llewyn Davis and Raising Arizona’s Hi, the tumbling tumbleweed of the Dude – which makes their explicit Westerns ( True Grit, No Country for Old Men) feel especially Coenesque.
No Country for Old Cowboys: The Old West is always a fascinating milieu for the Coens’ particular brand of idiosyncracies. Each of the six segments follows a different story of doomed adventurers out on the frontier – the titular Buster Scruggs ( Tim Blake Nelson), a cheery singing cowboy with the deadly bloodlust of Anton Chigurh a bank robber ( James Franco) who keeps escaping certain hanging by increasingly karmic threads a limbless traveling orator (Henry Melling) silently suffering the bitterness of his impresario ( Liam Neeson) a prospector ( Tom Waits) probing an Edenic valley for a pocket of gold a young bride-to-be ( Zoe Kazan) enduring a dangerous wagon train ride to a new life and a group of coach passengers ( Saul Rubinek, Tyne Daly, Chelcie Ross) discovering the Gothic fate that awaits them at their destination. The Pitch: Originally borne as a Netflix series, Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs has instead found life as a straightforward anthology film, a melange of grimly comic vignettes set in the Old West.
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