3 out of 5

Directed by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

The Coen brothers are guilty of liking to tell stories.  That’s not a shameful source of guilt when you’re in the filmmaking industry, of course, especially when the brothers’ method of storytelling is so precise, and purposeful.  And often as a result of that, some ‘e’ words: engrossing; enthralling; entertaining.  Their films vary in spirit, determining which of those words are more likely to apply, but whether fiddling in noir, or pastiche, or comedy, or drama, every one of their films – even the lesser ones – is successful in terms of being a piece of storytelling: my eyes never drift from a Coen production.

And The Ballad of Buster Scruggs boils down that tale-telling even further, to an anthology of six, unconnected stories, linked only by that very myth-making era of its setting: the old West.  Setting is just as important as any other aspect of a Coen Bros movie, of course, and they’ve certainly gone in for films that sink deep into the locale and time – Miller’s Crossing, Hudsucker Proxy – but the West has that odd wishy-washiness to it that plays in to the kind of distracting fantasy that our writer / directors like to play with: characters in their movie are often not ‘heroes’ in a typical sense, but rather human types misled by their own humanity.  We have a lot of cultural imagery tied in to gunslingers and gold pannin’ and Injuns, and Buster Scruggs isn’t necessarily making any huge statement about that, but it takes six short glances at the era and mixes striking images of colorfully dudded cowboys and striking vistas with some dust, some dirt, some contemplative silence, and some blood.

Kicking off with the most outlandish vignette, which shares the film’s title, a singing gunslinger shoots his way through a town in ridiculous, cartoonish fashion, before squaring off against another “I can’t lose” type.  The first-time-out digital production for the brothers is perhaps most notable here: the gunplay has the heightened punch of Miller’s Crossing, but the world never quite feels lived in.  These are actors on a set.  But that’s not necessarily out of line with the tone: the movie leans in to this, often, and our opening and closing parts sort of outline that: that we’re in for a show, and that we’re here to observe.  The Buster Scruggs short is the only real outright ‘comical’ piece in the movie, and it’s a good way to shake us up.

Near Algodones follows, a bit more darkly humored, with a bank robbing a’gone wrong.  This is a simple variant on the Blood Simple / Fargo format: things just keep going wrong.  The shots look fantastic, it’s got a great punchline, but is the least impactful of the films’ six pieces.

And now one of the gloomiest, winter-set tales: Meal Ticket.  Told in a boldly minimalist style – there’s no ‘dialogue’, only the performance of its armless, legless orator, who’s trucked around from place to place to perform poetry and prose for dwindling audiences by his grizzled caretaker.  And when the audiences begin to disappear completely…  It’s possible to read into this: is the skill of storytelling becoming useless?  Thankfully, the Coens rarely go out of the their way to preach: they’re here only to tell their tales.  Meal Ticket is a haunting little story, but like most of Buster Scruggs, is almost too apparent right from its outset what its intentions are, though that, too, is evidence of our filmmakers’ skills: every iota of color and character expression immediately indicates tone.

All Gold Canyon has a bearded prospector taking us through the drudgery of digging for gold.  He exists muddied and muttering in the middle of a most gloriously natured valley, nabbing eggs from an owl nest for food but relenting to just take one when he spots the mother watching.  The short takes pleasure in his step-by-step, mud-covered struggle to unearth a gold vein, entrancing us in the process.

The Gal Who Got Rattled features a brother and sister joining a wagon train headed toward Oregon.  When the brother passes, the sister has to figure out how to find her way: what she’ll do now that she’s not being steered by her no-questions-asked brother.  The myth of ‘the good life’ crops up.  A pesky dog keeps barking and must be taken off to be shot, but runs away instead.  There’s the thought that things will work out okay.  And where other films might revel in tragedy or ‘Rattled’s brief moment of action, the Coens, again, are more interested in observing.  The Gal Who Got Rattled is intensely underplayed, and the most fleshed out story here.  It’s perhaps the only one that actually feels focused on character, and thus hits the hardest when we see the journey those characters go on.

The Mortal Remains closes out the film by once again reminding us to listen and watch and observe: five travelers in a stagecoach on its way to a hotel discuss love; life; death.  But it ain’t so trite.  The dialogue has that bountiful patter of the Coen’s best, with a fur trapper remarking on how he didn’t speak the same language as his wife, but that’s okay, ’cause people are all the same; a well-to-do lady trumpeting religion and class divide; a Frenchman correcting both that people are defined by their basest instincts; and then the two smiling, singing men riding opposite who may be bounty hunters, delighting in distracting their bounties before ‘thumping’ them.  There’s no scary music queue or slow pan, only the slowly fading light in the carriage, and yet, you share the same hesitation as our trio to get out of the coach and follow the hunters into the hotel when they’ve arrived.

The movie is framed without the usual narrator or host, only a hand turning the pages of a book, each story introduced by an illustration plate in that book.  The Ballad of Buster Scruggs feels almost like a test: distributed by Netflix, shot digitally.  Its focus on telling a story and indirect questioning of the intention and value of that seem like signs of The Coen Brothers trying to understand their place in modern film.  While the movie never quite elicits the same effect as the brothers’ best films, it’s certainly never uninteresting or without that same feeling of precision they always bring.  Just, this time, that was put to use to somewhat keep the material at arms length