The Coen Brothers reference the best in the Westerns

‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ is not the Coens’ best film, but it’s still better than anything else, writes Tymon Smith

Originally conceived as a six-part series for Netflix, the Coen Brothers’ latest venture into Western territory arrives on the streaming service as an anthology film made up of six, uniquely Coenesque fables of dark humour, bleak fate and the inevitable cruel trickery of death.

Because these are the Coens — everyone they know is in this film from longtime collaborators such as Tim Blake Nelson to Hollywood veterans like Liam Neeson, cult favourite Tom Waits and up-and-comers like James Franco and Zoe Kazan. As always the Coens also demonstrate their unique ability for secondary casting with a slew of distinctive faces and character actors filling out the rest of the cast.

Over two and a bit hours the film offers a mixed but never less than intriguing and increasingly bitter vision of the American frontier as a sometimes ramshackle, ultimately ruthless space for the execution of capitalist self-invention that lies at the heart of the nation’s foundational myth — be anything, do anything, damn what anyone may think.

As always with the Coens, there are plenty of cinematic winks and references for film buffs and pop historians to be enjoyed, beginning with an opening landscape shot of Monument Valley that evokes legendary master of the Western John Ford. Into this classic shot the brothers insert Tim Blake Nelson as the titular Buster Scruggs — a seemingly perky singing cowboy in the vein of Will Rogers but with a morally murky twist that makes him a distinctly Coen Brothers creation.

Buster’s opening story sets the tone for a series of tales that are held together by one overarching theme — life is short, brutal and nasty and death is its great equaliser. This is a message that’s delivered with increasing seriousness as the film progresses — from James Franco’s Clint Eastwood-style hapless bank robber; to Harry Melling’s limbless Ozymandias-performing actor whose livelihood is threatened by a counting chicken; to Tom Waits’s gold prospector channelling the spirit of Western character actor par excellence Walter Huston; to Zoe Kazan’s naïve bride-to-be trapped in a battle with Comanche on the Oregon trail and finally the Gothic Stagecoach double team of Englishman Jojo O’Neill and Irishman Brendan Gleeson in the film’s satisfyingly downbeat final segment, which pays tribute to Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow.

With music as always by Carter Burwell and distinctive cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel, the six segments manage to hang together in look and feel if not always in tone and telling.

There are things that don’t gel but overall there are far too many deliciously delightful and distinctive touches in each of the stories to remind us of why the brothers have remained a unique voice in American cinema for just over three decades, earning their own adjective and the same space for future emulation and acknowledgement that they have given to their own cinematic heroes here.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs may not be their most perfectly realised film but it’s certainly one that still manages to stand head and shoulders above most of the films you’ll see this year and that, “pardner, is summin’ to celebrate”.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is on Netflix