ON DEMAND
The Coens’ Cowboy anthology shows how The west was fun…
The Coen brothers, plus an Orson Welles double-bill.
When The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs was announced, the rub was that the Coen brothers were making their first foray into television. True, this western-themed anthology is streaming via a Netflix account near you. But the writer/director siblings’ slick six-parter is as cinematic as they come, its short films each brilliantly evoking the cowboy-era tropes that dominated Hollywood way back when.
With the film framed as an unseen reader leafs through a battered old storybook, the titular opening episode is a riot. O Brother, Where Art Thou? star Tim Blake Nelson plays the eponymous cowboy, a singing quickdraw master in the Roy Rogers mould. For those Coen fans yearning for some old-school comic violence, the sort they used to peddle circa 1987’s Raising Arizona, this is the short for you.
The grisly but exuberant tone continues into second story ‘Near Algodones’, which stars James Franco as a bank robber who gets more than he bargained for during one particular crime spree. Borrowing from the Sergio Leone-inspired spaghetti western era, it doles out shootings
and hangings aplenty - all that’s missing is Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name.
As the stories unfold, however, melancholia begins to seep in. In the gothic-infused ‘Meal Ticket’, Liam Neeson stars as a freak-show impresario saddled with an armless, legless man (Harry Potter’s Harry Melling) reciting Shakespeare and Shelley. Even by Coen standards, this is hauntingly strange - not least the sight of Neeson helping his charge urinate by squeezing him like an accordion.
The only adaptation is the fourth short, ‘All Gold Canyon’, taken from a Jack London story first published in 1906. It stars Tom Waits as a prospector panning for a “pocket” of the shiny stuff. Purely as a chance to watch a perfectly cast Waits fill up the screen for 15 minutes, it’s glorious. The fifth story, ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’ is the longest (and one of the most satisfying), featuring Zoe Kazan (The Big Sick) as a mousy girl who meets the love of her life (The Alienist’s Bill Heck) on a wagon train.
Arguably, the only disappointment is the sixth and final chapter, ‘The Mortal Remains’, which features Tyne Daly and Brendan Gleeson among a posse of travellers in a stage coach. It’s something of a damp squib compared to its predecessors, which are nearly all perfectly formed jewels (all shot by Bruno Delbonnel and scored by Carter Burwell). For a pure blast of Coenformed fun, though, Buster Scruggs is hard to beat. James Mottram