Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ on Netflix, a Coen Brothers Ditty That Loses Its Tune

The Coen Brothers’ latest film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, has walked a long and winding road towards its streaming release. For one thing, it wasn’t always going to be a film. Originally announced as an anthology TV series, it has since coalesced into a two-hour-and-ten-minute compendium of six tales of the old West, each told with the signature archly philosophical violence that is so often the Coens’ stock in trade.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The six tales that make up the Coens’ anthology aren’t linked by any characters or ongoing plot, aside from the setting of the old West. The first story follows tuneful gunslinger Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) as he moseys into a possibly hostile town. His reputation as a sharp-shooter precedes him, and his amiable crooning belies what might actually be a sociopathy. It’s the zippiest and most memorable of the six stories, and given that it comes first, that assessment doesn’t bode all that well for the rest of the film.

The following episodes (let’s just call them episodes; it still feels very much like a short TV season aired all at once) include James Franco as an outlaw about to be hanged, and Liam Neeson as a sideshow huckster whose attraction, a limbless orator who recites everything from “Ozymandias” to “The Gettysburg Address” (Harry Melling), is both Neeson’s meal ticket and burden. There’s Tom Waits as a diligent gold prospector and Zoe Kazan as a young woman embarking upon the Oregon Trail (Meek’s Cutoff shout-out!). And the final installment is a kind of spooky story about a stagecoach full of strangers (played by the likes of Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, and Saul Rubinek) that ends up pretty much exactly where you think it’s going to once you see the chapter title that precedes it.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Coen Brothers are hardly strangers to the Western genre, having scored a Best Picture nomination for True Grit and a Best Picture win for No Country for Old Men. But starting things off with the folksy narration from Buster Scruggs gives the film an air of The Big Lebowski, which boasted that great bemused Sam Elliott narration and the song about the tumbling tumbleweeds.

Performance Worth Watching: The fact that Buster Scruggs got its start as a TV show and not a movie means it bypassed the usual cavalcade of A-list stars lining up to take all the plum roles. Which in a way is nice, because it gives great, less luminary names like Nelson, Kazan, Rubinek, Bill Heck, and Grainger Hines. But the standout for me was Tom Waits putting on essentially a one-man show as a dogged old prospector. For being such a brilliant musician, Waits has always brought an irresistible spark and screen presence to the collection of oddballs and everymen he’s played in movies from Short Cuts to The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

Memorable Dialogue: A Coen Brothers movie is always going to have some great, snappy dialogue, and even with some of the more taciturn characters of their filmography (the Waits character speaks to himself in grunts and grumbles; the segment with Neeson’s limbless sideshow is almost entirely pre-published speeches), Buster Scruggs comes up with some gems. Particularly when the character of Buster Scruggs is involved. His peppy, folksy demeanor endures even in the middle of a shootout, when one particularly resilient foe inspires him to remark, “Looks like when they made this fella, they forgot to put in the quit.”

Single Best Shot: Perhaps the most important collaboration on The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the re-teaming of the Coens with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, whose only other Coens film was the gorgeously melancholy Inside Llewyn Davis. There are plenty of brilliant, creative shots in this movie, including one of a cloud of Buster Scruggs-shaped dust that made me giggle for a long while. But my favorite is the shot over Waits’ shoulder as the gumnan who would relieve him of his gold deposit makes himself known.

Sex and Skin: The Coen brothers have never been the sexiest filmmakers to begin with, and this arch western anthology wasn’t going to be where they turned over a new leaf.

Our Take: It feels presumptuous at the very least to ask “What was the point of this movie” in relation to a Coen Brothers feature. The point is that the Coens were moved by the spirit to make a bunch of short stories about death in the old West, and when the Coens make a new movie, you go. Still, it’s hard to shake the idea that these six interludes are the brothers noodling around the edges of a theme (despite the West’s copious legends, death was a sad and often unspectacular certainty) without really hitting a nerve. And so we’re left with the varying quality of the episodes themselves. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is short, sweet, and memorable. The Zoe Kazan chapter, titled “The Gal Who Got Rattled” goes long but probably has the most resonant story. The James Franco episode is largely forgettable, and as much fun as it is who watch Saul Rubinek monologue and Tyne Daly affect a theatrical fainting spell (genuinely, it’s a treat), but the spooky-stories-to-tell-in-the-dark tone of the finale feels insubstantial. It’s a mixed bag, all things considered, and I’m not sure the good outweighs the tedious. One should never take a Coen Brothers film for granted, but this definitely feels like one of the least of their efforts.

Our Call: Stream the first segment, then Skip It.

Stream The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix