The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS   **1/2

Joel and Ethan Coen

2018

IDEA:  An anthology of six mordant tales about the old American west.

BLURB:  Torn from the pages of myth but drained of heroism, glory, and most metrics of justice, the Wild West depicted in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a vast province of amoral chaos and merciless death. It plays host to killers, cowards, mountebanks, and miscreants, all roaming a boundless, seemingly godless Earth, subject to the caprices of the mortal plane. When decency does threaten to find purchase, it becomes almost inevitably snuffed out. Characteristically mischievous and as blithely morose as ever, the Coens exploit this pitiless American frontier for perhaps their most acrid expression yet of an essentially indifferent universe. Their six self-contained tales, cleverly positioned as chapters in an old storybook, constantly betray a worldview vacillating between the nihilistic and the absurd, although the tenor of most chapters leans closest to the former, as the Coens convey how tenuous and expendable life was in the old west while positing little consistent rhyme or reason for the fates that befall their characters. Actions may not be meaningless, but they certainly don’t guarantee anything as psychopathic gunslingers ascend to the heavens and innocent settlers lay in the dirt with bullets in their heads. Everyone’s going to the same place, just as surely as that book will be closed by film’s end. While the Coens take evident delight in many of the ways they get there, there is a lack of visual imagination and thematic texture on display that is disappointing coming from such ingenious filmmakers. The stories tend to strike the same contrapuntal notes of frivolity and despair with little variation, and while the sense of redundancy is apt for a film concerned with the cycles of human folly, it creates a fairly leaden viewing experience. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which also can’t find a way to accommodate a narrative about anyone who isn’t white, ultimately remains somewhat stuck in the cobwebs of the myths it riffs on as well as on ideas the Coens have explored to greater depth in the past.