BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS SONGS MOVIE
These stories are so familiar, you may have sworn you’ve seen this movie before. (The Coen’s recurring collaborator Stephen Root is a standout.) But outside of the outrageous comedy of its first chapter, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs brings nothing fresh to the table. And most manage to bring a spark to the roles, even in unforgivingly brief screen times. The ensemble is well cast, with each member swiftly establishing a familiar archetype, like the black-hatted rogue, the fretful damsel, the wild-eyed old coot, or the white-hatted hero. Through these setups, there’s ample opportunity to revel in the rapturous beauty of sprawling deserts, echoing canyons, and babbling rivers. And in the cramped final segment “The Mortal Remains,” a motley crew of travelers (which includes Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek, Chelcie Ross, Jonjo O’Neill, and Tyne Daly) shares awkward conversation while confined together in a speeding stagecoach. The grim but compelling “The Gal Who Got Rattled” stars Zoe Kazan as a doe-eyed damsel-in-distress in the midst of a treacherous wagon train journey. In “All Gold Canyon,” Tom Waits is crusty and captivating as a lone prospector who mines for gold in a stretch of glorious wilderness untouched by man. A bearded Liam Neeson is haggard and nearly mute in the ponderous and morbid “Meal Ticket,” which follows a traveling show through a rocky patch. Despite some peculiar panache in form of a pot-covered gunman, squabbling deputies, and clever cuts, this segment is an overlong wind-up for a mediocre punchline (that’s spoiled in the trailer). In “Near Algodones,” James Franco pops by as a nameless bank robber plagued by bad luck. But once we leave Buster behind, the film soon sours, turning bleaker and less satisfying in its endings. The violence in this segment is bloody, yet its execution is cartoonish, enacted with the cavalier imagination of Looney Tunes confrontations. When Buster enters a bustling saloon, he pats his vest and chaps down to shake loose the dust, and that dust lingers in a Buster-shaped cloud as he walks away. There’s a charming ludicrousness to this segment that harkens back to Coen comedies like O Brother or The Hudsucker Proxy.
He makes for a strange yet enchanting introduction to this wobbly Western.
Buster does all this with a broad smile and without ever soiling his gleaming white getup. O Brother Where Art Thou‘s Tim Blake Nelson stars as the garrulous Buster Scruggs, who improvises quirky cowboy songs as easily as he mercilessly murders any fool who’d dare cross him. The film opens on a well-worn book, which contains six short stories: “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” “Near Algodones,” “Meal Ticket,” “All Gold Canyon,” “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” and “The Mortal Remains.” The first of these unconnected tales is the most entertaining by far. Tim Blake Nelson as Buster Scruggs in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
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