The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

Though it may be tempting, in the age of television’s dominance, to view the six sections of the Coen brothers’ new anthology film as separate episodes, it would be a mistake to do so: the parts of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs cross-pollinate and speak to the whole in profound, disquieting, morbidly funny ways.

The first of these parts is the story of Buster (Tim Blake Nelson), a Gene Autry singing cowboy type, who has earned for himself the epithet of ‘the misanthrope’. A superb gunslinger and an even finer vocalist, Buster finds himself having to utilise both of his skills quickly and frequently. The second, ‘Near Algodones’, an existentialist farce, stars James Franco as a luck-deprived bank-robber.

The third and fourth parts become explicitly political in a way that feels like a departure for the directors. The former is ‘Meal Ticket’, in which Liam Neeson tours his variety act, a legless and armless young man (Harry Melling) who recites Shakespeare, Shelley, and Lincoln with a rhetorical energy fit for the stage. This chapter feels like the logical conclusion of Bud Grossman’s remark to Llewyn in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), a comment that seems to haunt the Coens’ filmography: “I don’t see any money in this.” The exact opposite is the concern of ‘All Gold Canyon’, in which Tom Waits’s lonesome prospector digs for gold pockets in a pristinely gorgeous valley, fit only for CGI fauna.

The fifth, longest, and best part is ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’, following Alice (Zoe Kazan) as she journeys on the Oregon trail. (Something of a return for Kazan — she starred in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) , also set on the Oregon trail.) Finding herself alone, she meets Billy Knapp (Bill Heck), one of the leaders of the wagon train, and the two begin a sweet, shy, sincerely romantic courtship. The closing section, ‘Mortal Remains’, is mostly a chamber affair, in which the passengers of a stagecoach regale each other with tales of their lives, and the world views they espouse.

The formal elements sing as well as Scruggs himself: the Coens are clearly delighted in being able to indulge in the vocabulary and syntax that they do, and some of the sentences granted to characters are just fabulous; Carter Burwell’s score (particularly the theme in ‘The Gal’) moves brilliantly with the different sections; the performances across the board are quite marvelous (especially in the cases of Kazan and Heck); and Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography scans the respective landscapes of the film’s parts for a bouquet of richly beautiful and bleak images.

Death is the preoccupation of the film, and the way it figures — in elisions, in reversals, in changes of register and speed, in relief and confirmation of the fate — in the Coens’ storytelling is befitting to its thematic centrality for the directors. They’re soulfully despondent about this world, or as Buster Scruggs poetically phrases it: “In the used to be.”