The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Ranking the Coen Bros.

2018, d. Joel and Ethan Coen - Netflix
[Reposted from my letterboxd, typos and all, originally written Nov 16, 2018]

Anthologies are always a challenge for me. Movies, books, comics... I'm never left satisfied. There's too many stories, usually of different length, sometimes connected by theme or genre, sometimes only tenuously connected, often not really connected at all. They usually vary in length and tone, often by different creatives, and invariably you have to compare one story against the rest, and even in the best cases there's always a dud, or one that overshadows all the others. It's never a satisfying experience.

I think the only place where the anthology can really work is television. We're talking The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Black Mirror, but also the idea of season-length anthologies like Fargo, True Detective, or American Horror Story. With the former, the episode by episode format of anthology gives separation, but also structure. Not every episode will be equal but the separation between stories (talking about old school weekly viewing, but also the separation provided by opening title and end credits sequences) provides a buffer to immediate juxtaposition. As individual episodes they're standalone, like short films, not treated as a necessary part of a whole package. The season length anthology is just more fulfilling, a mini-series that lives on it's own each year, all the benefits of regular television but with the satisfaction of both an intended story structure and closure.

Which brings us to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology feature from the Coen Brothers (Ethan Coen no stranger to anthology storytelling, having written more than a few collections of short stories). The early rumour was this exploration of the old West was intended as a tv anthology but it's six tales each run at wildly different lengths (from 10 to 40 minutes) which would make tv serialization impossible. [edit: the "series" rumour has been disproven]

The only real way to tackle reviewing an anthology is story by story, but that type of reviewing also exemplifies the fact that an anthology cannot really be viewed as a whole unit, rather only it's pieces.

The film takes its name from the opening story, following Tim Blake Nelson's singing gunslinger through a breif and violently whimsical journey (it makes me want a Shaolin Cowboy movie adaptation from the Wachowskis). I had incorrectly inferred that Buster Scruggs would be the film's Cryptkeeper, the connecting thread between stories, but no such luck. Just the turning of pages transitions us from one to the next.

James Franco robs a bank in the next story, but gets foiled by the teller played by Stephen Root. It's the shortest of the stories but tonally consistent with the previous, if a little less fantastical.

The third story follows a limbless orator as he travels the countryside with Liam Neeson as his caretaker making a meager living entertaining meager (and thrifty) crowds. Is this a friendship? A business partnership? Or an exploitative relationship? Ultimately, it's overlong, cast in such grey, and lacking the wit and charm of the previous entries, destroying the cohesiveness for the rest of the film.

The next story takes full advantage of Bruno Delbonnel's beautiful cinematography as Tom Waits panhandlers for gold. It's luscious color palette is in stark contrast to the four dankness of the previous story. It's just as deliberate a story as the last, really getting the sense of the time to spare on such endeavours people had way back when.

While the first two stories were rather pithy and energetic, these two slow things right down, peeling away the idealism of the old West, leading into the fifth story, a forty minute romantic tragedy on a wagon train to Oregon. Due to it's length it's easy to invest in the characters, and understanding the painstaking hardship of travel seems to be the point. The early romanticism of old West tropes have washed away, here there's bare practicality and excruciating nothingness, coupled with a gut blow of an ending.

The final story finds five heads in a carriage, talking, a spectre of darkness aptly surrounding them, but the Coen's see fit to return levity via the uncomfortable, forced interaction of strangers who would otherwise not associate with one another. It's an engaging dialogue but quite much to take after three tales of a more photographic quality and already nearly 2 hours deep. If anything, it serves as a reminder of how awesome Tyne Daly is, and she should be in more things.

As a whole, it's a Coen Brothers production so it's worth the time spent, but as a Coen Brothers production it's on the bottom end of their spectrum. I also wished the had better Native American representation than just as attacking war parties.

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I'm being lazy with Buster Scruggs i, not writing a brand new review because, well, I don't have a lot more to say about it, just as I didn't have much to say about it then. I did find it generally tedious to watch and frequently checked the timestamp to see how much was remaining. The Coens love a tight movie so whenever one goes over two hours, you feel it.

The Blank Check Podcast pointed out that the connecting thread of these stories is death, but it's tough for me to really think of it a theme of each of these stories. 

My ranking of the Buster Scruggs stories:

1. The Gal Who Got Rattled
2. All Gold Canyon
3. Near Algodones
4. The Mortal Remains
5. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
6. Meal Ticket

Now that I have rewatched all 18 of the Coens films together, here are my rankings, subject to change.

1. Fargo
2. The Big Lebowski
3. Hail, Caesar!
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. A Serious Man
6. No Country For Old Men
7. The Hudsucker Proxy
8. Blood Simple
9. Burn After Reading
10. Miller's Crossing
11. True Grit
12. Barton Fink
13. The Man Who Wasn't There
14. Intolerable Cruelty
15. Raising Arizona
16. O Brother, Where Art Thou
17. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
18. The Ladykillers

It's a difficult list to make because 60% of these films are flat out masterpieces, and most of the rest are troubled but still generally likeable. I mean, True Grit is an incredible, maybe even perfect film, and I have it out of the top 10, which is absurd.

My top 3 was my top 3 going into this rewatch and they remained relatively untested. LLewyn Davis and A Serious Man were both a lock for the top 5 and jockeyed back and forth, with Llewyn taking the edge because I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. The films in the 6-13 slots could probably be re-arranged any which way and I would still be happy with that ranking.

The only real surprise in making the list is that Raising Arizona jumped 3 spots from the bottom...and maybe that Burn After Reading made it into the top 10. It's probably the only non-masterpiece in the top ten, but it is so much fun. It's very possible that I may be finally warming to Raising Arizona but I just don't have the sentimentality towards it like so many others do. But sentimentality is why Fargo and Lebowski are my 1 and 2.

Of all these films, only the bottom three do I feel hesitant to watch again. In fact, I would probably watch The Ladykillers before O Brother or Buster Scruggs but it's pretty unanimous that The Ladykillers is absolutely their weakest film. For the record, if I were to add in Joel and Ethan's solo works, Honey, Don't would slot in between The Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable Cruelty while Drive Away Dolls would slot in just after Raising Arizona. I don't even know where to put The Tragedie of Macbeth because it's nothing like the rest of their oeuvre. It sits on its own outside of it all...or it's last, I guess even though it's clearly a better film than The Ladykillers at least.

But what an unbelievable delight it is to have all these films in the world, and to revisit them in succession. It was a real effort to watch them week-to-week and not gorge myself on them. But, next time there will be a gorging.