The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: A Film Review
The Coen brothers deliver a motley classic
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is A-grade hack-you-up-at-the-funny-bone Coen brothers cinematic nihilism. In its six chapters, all separate stories of fantastically varying tone and tenor, Joel and Ethan Coen tell a biblical tale of the Wild West where meaninglessness and folly is Ecclesiastical in its reach and senseless suffering is so prevalent that even Job himself would blush at his good fortune. Highly entertaining.
The outré auteurs start things off with “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” the story of the most feared gunman in the West who sings and shoots his way through town with zealous goofiness and jarring gore. It’s fitting that the Coens begin with this story as it introduces the film’s weighty themes with cartoonish zaniness — think Raising Arizona rather than No Country for Old Men — and therefore makes the bleakness of what follows just a bit more palatable. Finally, the placement of this story works because the titular character Buster Scruggs answers a question many viewers might have about the film: is this a hateful movie because it is so morbid and gleeful in its presentation of existence as devoid of hope and of human nature as ceaselessly brutal and savage? Buster Scruggs’ response comes in the form of a comment on his wanted poster. In that poster his name is presented as “Buster Scruggs ‘The Misanthrope.’” Scruggs takes offense at this characterization replying, “Misanthrope? I don’t hate my fellow man. Even when he’s tiresome, and surly, and tries to cheat at poker I figure that’s just the human material.” Then, drawing on his inner Marcus Aurelius, Scruggs concludes, “and him that finds in it cause for anger and dismay is just a fool for expecting better.”
Next up is “Near Algodones” the tale of bank robber who finds himself at the end of a noose twice before his story concludes. Here the Coens play with their themes of the inevitability of fate, the certainty of death, and the cruelty of human nature. The bankrobber can’t escape his fate of hanging and when the gallows finally do drop him the sound of the gathered crowd is one of applause and not abhorrence.
In “Meal Ticket,” the most bleak of the six stories, a limbless orator named Harrison entertains the sparse towns of the…
