Too bad the title of the new multi-story Coen brothers film is taken from the first of its episodes. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” has the ring of a cartoon spoof, and it’s a perfectly suitable title for the film’s first segment, a Western send-up so broad it reminds us that every Coen brothers film has a little Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner spinning around inside it.
But this movie, taken as a whole, is no spoof, nor a cartoon. Its first two sections are very funny, but gradually the project moves away from comedy and into something else, something kind of amazing.
Exquisitely crafted and relentlessly bleak, “Buster Scruggs” is a glorious wagon train of dark mischief, a strangely entertaining autopsy on the human condition. Like Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Burn After Reading,” it pretends to be silly while it slips you the needle.
That first episode introduces us to Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson, from the Coens’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou”), a pipsqueak gunslinger with a quick draw, whose time in an Old West town is necessarily limited. He also sings. Of course.
The next story places James Franco and Stephen Root in a funny one-joke premise that’s literally “gallows humor.” Things go grimmer with a tale about a theatrical trouper (Liam Neeson) traveling with his performer, a master thespian (the curious Harry Melling, from the “Harry Potter” world) who happens to lack arms and legs.
Next, Tom Waits stars as a prospector (of the variety inevitably described as “grizzled”) digging his way to a gold strike, in a tale — adapted from a Jack London short story — less sarcastic than the others here.
There’s a wagon train story, with Zoe Kazan as a forlorn traveler, Bill Heck as a lovelorn scout and Grainger Hines as the trail boss. This episode’s bitter pill is a typical Coen concept: Take certain well-worn characters from the Western and turn them on their heads, put comedy where you expect sincerity and sour endings where you expect happy ones.
The final yarn is a “Twilight Zone” number about a mysterious stagecoach ride, a jaunt that sews everything together with a morbid wink. The five actors in this piece are just right, from the familiar faces of Brendan Gleeson and Tyne Daly to the choice character actors Saul Rubinek and Chelcie Ross, to the splendidly odd JonJo O’Neill.
The movie has a very limited theatrical release, but you can watch it right now on Netflix, and it’s as though the Coens handed an exploding cigar to the cable channel: “Buster Scruggs” isn’t so much about spoofing the Western as it is declaring storytelling itself to be a deadly pastime.
I don’t read reviews before I write my own, but I scanned some Rotten Tomatoes headlines and noticed the consensus, even among Coen fans, is that “Buster Scruggs” is “uneven,” the sort of crapshoot you expect with an anthology film.
I disagree. Everything fits together in a commanding way: every piece of buckskin, every shaft of light falling across some dadburn varmint’s face, every carefully chosen actor (recognizable and otherwise). It’s like a beautifully embroidered needlework laid across a gravesite. See it on Netflix and be chilled, because “Buster Scruggs” is a reminder that most Western ballads were about the way to dusty death.
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (4 stars)
The new film from Joel and Ethan Coen is a multi-story Western saga, initially quite funny but increasingly bleak. The film turns beloved storytelling conventions on their heads, and reminds us in strangely entertaining ways that those old cowboy ballads were all about death. Great cast of knowns and not-so-knowns, led by Tim Blake Nelson, Tom Waits and Liam Neeson.
Rating: R, for violence
Opening: Friday on Netflix
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