James Franco gets the necktie treatment. Photo courtesy of gamesoul.it
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), written and directed by the Coen Brothers; starring Liam Neeson, James Franco, Tyne Daly, Chelcie Ross, Zoe Kazan, and many more. #film #western #fantasy
The CoBros aren’t everyone’s cuppa tea. Their quirkiness and weirdness, served up with a heavy dosage of "irony," can be wearing if you're not in the right mood for it. If you are, a good CoBros film can be a genuine treat.
Buster Scruggs is the CoBros at the top of their form: quirky, humorous, and dark all at once—plus, it has songs! The tone of this grisly, funny and tuneful film is kind of like what would happen if you took Sam Pekinpah’s epic Western bloodfest, The Wild Bunch, and crossed it with the 50s musical, Annie Get Your Gun.
Buster Scruggs is an anthology of six short segments dealing with life in the American Old West. Each segment is introduced via a framing device of an old-fashioned clothbound book of stories, complete with numerous “color plates” of illustrations and "Antique Silver" typeface. (As someone who grew up in an era where there were still plenty of these types of old books floating around, I must say the book's details are spot-on.) The stories are akin to the campfire tales that cowboys and settlers told each other to make the long nights pass: by turns grim and comic, each with a "twist" at the end to wrap them up. None of the stories are connected, which may irritate some people, but not if you just treat them as separate episodes of a series.
Many people die in these "episodes"; at least one person takes a trip to Boot Hill in each segment, and in some, many more than that. In the first, titular segment, a clownish-but-tuneful gunslinger named Buster Scruggs wipes out an entire canteen of desperadoes, then moves on to more killing down the road. All the while singing corny cowboy songs or pattering a line of verbose bull to the camera. It's by turns comic, surreal, and gruesome.
The other segments depict a public hanging, an attempted gold claim robbery, a particularly foul murder, a savage Indian attack, and at the last, a Twilight Zone-inspired trip on a black stagecoach that doesn’t stop for any reason until it reaches its destiny.
The stories vary in quality and are not connected; as with a lot of CoBros films, the oddball characters are the real meat of this film. Many are simply unforgettable; many are portrayed by expert character actors like Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, and Chelcie Ross. A-List headliners Liam Neeson and James Franco each have a starring role in their own segment (Neeson is almost unrecognizable as a grizzled traveling showman). Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursely in the Harry Potter tales, does a remarkable job of acting in the disturbing segment entitled Meal Ticket, as a tragic show performer with no arms or legs.
Cinematography by the Frenchman Bruno Delbonnel (Amelie) recalls the vast sweep of Western topography as limned by the cowboy sagas of the great John Ford. This is the CoBros’ first digitally shot film and it does look like someone had fun with filters in post-production, particularly in the last segment, which delivers a ghostly-looking stagecoach and a strangely glowing Victorian hotel. (The front double doors of the hotel have an angel relief above one side and a devil relief above the other, hint hint.)
I would give it an 8/10, with a 10/10 for the characters and dialogue.
