On The Ballard of Buster Scruggs

For a few years Netflix have struggled to repeat the quality of their TV series’ and documentaries in feature film. But, what began with Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) (their first good film) has snowballed into their Autumn/Winter output: Outlaw King (2018), The Ballard of Buster Scruggs and the upcoming Roma (2018), which early reviews would suggest is very good.

The Ballard of Buster Scruggs finds the Coen brothers on familiar ground, the western. Joel and Ethan Coen are certainly ‘up there’ with some of the most consistently good, often brilliant, American film makers, so it is no surprise that Buster Scruggs is good, but it is welcome to find that it is excellent and one of their finest. Unlike their other films, Buster Scruggs is not a single narrative, but instead a portmanteau of short stories that share one significant feature in common: The American west.

Each of the stories, which begin and end with an unseen reader looking through a book, are connected by a love of the landscape and an awareness of the history and mythology of the time. Therefore, we find, in each story, the familiar and generic delivered in ways which are fresh, funny, violent, fantastical and much more. There is the gold prospector, the caravan moving across states, the Native American attack, the gunslinger, the coach, the bank robber. In each of these we find invective ways of telling old stories.

This is first a film that you first fall for with your eyes. It is shot with love. Each setting, each piece of landscape, recognisable from so many other Westerns could be framed and put in a gallery. A second common theme is that of the oral tradition and here we find the Coens in more familiar territory. From Fargo (1996) to No Country for Old Men (2007), stories as a main form of communication, the notion of the hearth, is core to their narratives and in each of Buster Scruggs’ stories we find tales being told. These could be musical, as with O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000) or seemingly, at first, insignificant, but to which you must pay attention. The Coens’ films are rooted in myth and here it is the myth of the American West.

The Ballard of Buster Scruggs is masterful and demands repeat viewing.