Dead Man's Hand

Ethan and Joel Coen’s Ballad of Buster Scruggs may be the perfect movie for those who enjoyed Eric Idle leading his crucified companions in ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ in the finale of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. 

The Coens’ come naturally by tall tales, oddball characters and gallows humor. In fact, a man in this film about to be hanged asks another blubbering next to him: ‘First time?’ They show in this film that tall tales and dark humor helped to make bearable the unrelenting discomfort of living and downright horror of dying in America’s Old West to our forebears, the oddballs, misfits and outcasts that peopled it. The Indians did not have a chance.

The film’s six ‘chapters’ are six unrelated narratives of the Old West told in different styles, from a kitsch movie singing cowboy to a gothic ghost yarn.

Six faces of unrelenting discomfort and the horror of dying in America’s Old West.

 

The MP’s only spoiler will be to note that the film opens with a movie dude cowpoke warbling the Roy Rogers standard ‘Cool Water’ with his horse Old Dan practically skipping along as the orchestrated music reverberates from within the guitar box to echo off the rimrock. This is Tim Blake Nelson, one of the Soggy Bottom Boys of the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, as the warbling, guitar-strumming pistolero Buster Scruggs the San Saba Songbird.

Tim Blake Nelson as the pistolero Buster Scruggs, the San Saba Songbird.

Cool and clear as the water he sings of, Buster cheerfully wisecracks his way around a succession of rugged customers, in one instance easily topping a Quentin Tarentino-like action trope and then seasoning it with: ‘I am not a devious man by nature. But when you are unarmed, your tactics might have to be downright Archimedean.’

If anything, this work is a tribute to American storytelling. As a character comments: ‘You know the story, but people can’t get enough of them, like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially.’

As in the Coens’ True Grit, the American characters speak the earnest formal English they learned from schoolmarms, avoiding the chronic Western movie cliché that makes frontier women sound like Shakers and the menfolk like modern football coaches and those selling trucks and tires on television.  

The Coens’ writing, direction, editing, cinematography, casting and music selections make their films stand out. But the way Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks speaks for what a joy this project must have been for the art and production people who wrestle with the thousands of devilish details. There is so much to see!


The cover of Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The ‘book’ the movie is based on looks like a nineteenth century original but was created wholly for the movie, from the cover design, page layout and typeface to the text and captioned color illustrations that introduce each movie chapter: it is perfect, and perfectly beautiful.

Captioned illustration of ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’ in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The sets go from natural to traditional Western to expressionist and are filled with fascinating details. The costuming is a marvel. Production designer Jess Gonchor, art director Steve Christensen, costumier Mary Zophres and their skilled staffs have done outstanding work here.

The narrative consists of six unrelated chapters from the book told as vignettes. The title story ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ features the singing Tim Blake Nelson, Willie Watson as The Kid, and a large supporting cast of saloon barflies, baddies and townspeople. David Lynch could not have dreamed up a wilder ending.

James Franco as a hard-luck cowboy in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

‘Near Algodones’ features James Franco as a hard-luck cowboy, Stephen Root as a half-crazed pans-wearing banker, and a large supporting cast of cowboy posses, Indians and townspeople.

Harry Melling, the ‘Meal Ticket’ performer in Ballad of Buster Scruggs

‘Meal Ticket’, features Liam Neeson as the Impresario of a wagon-borne theatrical show, Harry Melling, his Meal Ticket, an armless and legless theatrical performer; Paul Rae is a Chicken Impresario, and there are other performers and people watching the shows. The Meal Ticket’s act follows accounts of this kind of frontier entertainment, such as Mark Twain’s Duke and Dauphin in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He opens with a dramatic recitation of Percy Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and includes a biblical passage, Shakespeare excerpts and the Gettysburg Address.

Tom Waits prospects The Big Country in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

‘All Gold Canyon’, based on a Jack London story, features Tom Waits as a singing prospector looking for ‘Mr. Pocket’, whose rendition of ‘Mother Macree’ chases nature away; Sam Dillon is a predatory interloper.

Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) in Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’, from a Stewart Edward White story, is a nineteenth-century romance set in an Oregon-bound ox-drawn wagon train, with Bill Heck and Grainger Hines as train masters William ‘Billy’ Knapp and Mr. Arthur. Zoe Kazan and Jefferson Mays play the sister and brother Alice and Gilbert Longabaugh, with Gilbert’s terrier President Pierce and a large cast of settlers, Indians and oxen. This vignette drags a little, though it may have been the most difficult, time-consuming and expensive to make, judging from the Coens’ interview with Terry Gross. Having heard the interview, it is funny to see that the barking dog is principal animal.

Frenchman (Saul Rubinek), Lady (Tyne Daly) and Trapper (Chelcie Ross).

‘The Mortal Remains’ is a gothic ghost story performed as an ensemble piece by five stagecoach passengers. Tyne Daly plays Lady, Jonjo O’Neill and Brendan Gleeson are English and Irish singing ‘bounty hunters’, Saul Rubinek is René, a Frenchman, and Chelcie Ross is a trapper ‘unused to social discourse’. Gleeson’s singing of ‘The Unfortunate Lad’ is a natural beauty; the air works as a theme similar to ‘I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow’ in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Jonjo O’Neill and Brendan Gleeson as English and Irish singing ‘bounty hunters’.

MP is fortunate to have seen this film made for television and currently in limited theatrical release. We hope that it will be rereleased more widely so that those who love Westerns and the Coen brothers’ films in particular will be able to enjoy this entertaining gem on cinema screens everywhere.

‘You seen ‘em, you play ‘em,’ sneered the hard man.

Ballad of Buster Scruggs 2018 U.S. (133 minutes) Netflix. Written, directed and edited (as Roderick James) by Ethan and Joel Coen; music by Carter Burwell; cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel; casting by Ellen Chenoweth; production design by Jess Gonchor; art direction by Steve Christensen; costumes by Mary Zophres.