The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This one was an odd one for me. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs tells six, completely distinct and separate stories, essentially as a compilation of short films. This is a fairly rare format for a movie. Amores Perros comes close, with its triptych structure of three largely stand alone stories. Yet, in Amores Perros, all three stories overlap. They all take place in Mexico City, they all intersect at a pivotal car crash, and they all involve dogs in some capacity. Closer still is Paris Je T’aime, a collection of short films from a mixture of famous auteur directors and lesser known up and comers all about Paris, its inhabitants, and their struggles. Buster Scruggs doesn’t have this feast of different directorial styles, it is all the Coen Brothers. Nor does it have the interlocking stories of Amores Perros or the thematic cohesion of a city and its mythology, it is about the much more amorphous concept of the American west.

On paper, these ideas should lead to a good movie. I generally like Coen brothers movies and think they are, with perhaps a few exceptions, very entertaining. I think the idea of a collection of short films has a lot of potential. Paris Je T’aime is a truly fascinating look at what mature directors could do if they were forced to conform to a style of filmmaking they probably haven’t thought about since film school. The Coen Brothers even did one of the shorts for that project, albeit one of the stranger pieces of that collection. However, I did not find The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to be two great tastes that taste great together. Rather, it felt more like one of the brothers’ rare misses.

The segments of Buster Scruggs feel they are in a strange deadzone for length. They are not short enough to impress someone with the artistry required to convey a cinematic idea with such a minute length, as in Paris Je T’aime with its twenty segments in a two hour run time. Nor are they long enough for a fully formed story to develop, one where the audience cares about the characters and what happens to them like in Amores Perros. It is hard for me to care about the bandit who faces the hangman twice, other than the bitter irony of his story, because I know next to nothing about him. The irony alone was not enough to entertain or engage me. Maybe the one exception here is the story of the girl and her dog. While similar in length, it is perhaps slightly better written, able to condense a more complete story into the time it has.

Weirdly, this pacing issue isn’t limited to under developing a vignette. Sometimes it also leads to stretching an under developed idea longer than makes sense. The tale of the showman and his driver, for example, drags terribly. Very little happens and the recitations of Shakespeare, which fill the bulk of the segment’s time, are just that and nothing more. Yes, they build to something and yes, the editing of these speeches is accelerated over time to heighten the repetitiveness of the performance, but it all feels like a joke where the setup takes a half an hour longer than it should and the punchline isn’t even that funny.

On the topic of repetition, another problem the film faces is that the stories become predictable. No story is quite like any other story but every story is fully awash in the Coen brothers’ typical sardonic tone. It became easy to guess where any given vignette was going by simply asking myself what the most cruelly ironic ending would be and, without fail, the story ended there or somewhere very similar to there. It goes beyond just the theme that the west was tough or that people can be quite terrible to each other, doubly so when away from social constraints and the reach of the law. I have never felt that Sergio Leone movies, which universally explore that lawlessness, are somehow repetitive. Rather, it is the need for the maximally ironic ending that does Buster Scruggs in. Peak irony is a much more specific thing than grim cynicism and so stands out more, which in turn causes that feeling of predictability. This aspect of the film was particularly disappointing for me since the Coen brothers’ catalog, while typically scathing and cynical, is not so universally obsessed with dark irony. It feels like a Flanderization of the Coen brothers’ style: reducing a complex, often hilarious, and somewhat gentle misanthropy to a blunt instrument of shock value.

All that being said, one place that the picture does excel is in its visuals. The movie has a way of capturing the wide open spaces of the west in a way that really blows you away. It takes the grandiose wide shots of the empty wilds of America from the best of the classic westerns and combines it with the knockout image quality and color science of a modern digital production. The result is a delectable and opulent feast of staggeringly beautiful shots of America’s varied landscapes. The visual storytelling is solid too. For example, in the final story when the macabrely murderous bounty hunters reveal themselves as metaphorical “reapers,” it coincides with a shift in the color grade towards a tealish blue that gives the proceedings an almost spectral feel, disguised under a common visual trope of using blue lighting to signify the arrival of nighttime.

With six stories to choose from, covering such a variety of different topics, I thought there was an outside shot I’d like all of them but more likely I would like some and not others, similar to my experience with Paris Je T’aime. Unfortunately, I didn’t really like any of them. The stories are all paced poorly, enough so that I actually watched the collection in two sittings of three, just to break up the monotony. I believe the Coen brothers were aiming for slow, purposeful, and weighty, especially given the final story’s extended discussion of philosophical themes. Instead, they just failed to grab my attention. This is perfectly captured in the character of the trapper from the final story, who yammers on and on to the increasing frustration of his fellow stagecoach companions; the trapper is the film and I the companions. I applaud the noble but flawed effort to make something unique, and I certainly don’t mind it existing, but I would struggle heavily to recommend it to anyone outside of the most dedicated film nerds and future film school graduates interested in its atypical structure and gorgeous cinematography.

Would Recommend: If the nature of the fundamental experiment of the film, in particular in the hands of such a capable team of writer/directors, is worth seeing just for what is being attempted.

Would Not Recommend: If you are easily bored by slow and self-awarely artistic filmmaking.