Coen Brothers month: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

A review by Brooks Rich

This film was originally supposed to be an anthology show with the Coen's as showrunners. But things happened as they often do in Hollywood and it became their first Netflix exclusive film with six vignettes, all stylized in different forms of the western. Some are straight westerns with gunfights and old western towns. Others are more in the vein of the frontier westerns, which take place in the wilderness.

The titular segment is about the best gunfighter and singer in the west. The second segment, Near Algodones, is about a hapless bank robber. The third, Meal Ticket, is about two men with a traveling show. The fourth, All Gold Canyon, is about a prospector searching for gold in the untouched wilderness. The fifth, The Gal Who Got Rattled, is about a young woman traveling along the Oregon Trail. The sixth and final segment, The Mortal Remains, is about a stagecoach full of people who are discussing mortality.

All of them concern the fragility of life in the old west, how death can be around any corner. Fortunes can change in an instance. My top segments are the titular Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Meal Ticket, and All Gold Canyon. That's not to say the other three aren't good. Those are just the most powerful stories to me personally. It's one of those few anthology films where there's not really a weak entry. That's kind of like the Coen's filmography. There's not really a weak one, technically. There's just films that are better.

If I taught a film class on the Coen Brothers, I'd probably make this film the final one for the course. Everything that makes the Coen's what they are is in this film. Their mixture of comedy and at times disturbingly bleak drama is at work in each of these segments. Every character is memorable and it is a film full of the characters they do best, the minor characters that stand out in their feature films.

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