WAY OUT WESTERNS
The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs is six Coen films for the price of one
Perhaps the biggest surprise about the new Coen brothers movie is that it turned out to be a movie. With their shock move to Netflix, it was taken as gospel that the unpredictable siblings’ next enterprise, a Western anthology diced into six discrete tales, was to be a television show. The IMDB still refers to it as Season 1.
In fact, that was never the case. “Everybody got the wrong end of the stick,” laughs Tim Blake Nelson, who fills the boots of cowboy troubadour Buster Scruggs, misanthropic hero of the title story. Not that this was some cunning Fargo-esque ruse, he hastens to add. “Joel and Ethan simply chose not to dispel any of the misconstruing that was going on. This was always a movie.”
Ten years ago, Joel had popped over to the actor’s New York apartment. “We’re going to make an anthology film,” he told his friend, and handed Nelson the script for the title episode, a miniature Western inspired by his performance as crooning dimbulb Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. As soon as they got around to writing four or five others, announced Joel, they were good to go.
Big with the European art-crowd and British horror directors in the ’60s, anthology flicks are short-story collections conjoined by theme or setting or genre. Long ago, the brothers had contemplated an anthology entitled The Contemplations, with each chapter unearthed in a dusty library. O Brother, The Man Who Wasn’t There and A Serious Man began life as Contemplations.
Originally going by the brevitydefying designation ‘The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs And Other Tales Of The American Frontier With Colour Plates’, the film’s parts are united by a contemplation of mortality. “Mortality in a world of unpredictability, violence and vengeance,” says Nelson. “But as with all of Joel and Ethan’s work, the subject is also the language of film itself.” Shot in New Mexico and the Nebraska Panhandle, using a familiar rogues’ gallery of peculiar faces, each of the 15-minute films-within-thefilm explores a different sub-genre of the Western. “You could also call it a Cubist or postmodern look at the genre from six different angles,” says Nelson. Here’s a quick breakdown of what to expect from each of the tales.
THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS Starring: Tim Blake Nelson, Harry Melling, David Krumholtz
According to Nelson, the title story explores a transition from the Singing Cowboy Western of the ’30s (as hailed in Hail, Caesar!) into “a precursor Sergio Leone Western”. Possibly involving an appointment with the gallows for Nelson’s balladeer. “I spent five months training for 15 minutes of screen time,” he says. “I had to learn to play the guitar from scratch and be able to play, sing and ride at the same time. I learned all these pistol tricks. And then when I got down to Santa Fe, they added a dance number.” NEAR ALGODONES Starring: James Franco, Ralph Ineson, Stephen Root In what Nelson classifies as the “Hapless Wanderer” style of Western, the “Franco one” follows a high-planes drifter whose attempts at bank robbery and cattlerustling are undone by general levels of incompetency and fecklessness. MEAL TICKET Starring: Paul Rae, Jiji Hise Harkening back to those Coen tales of Hollywood foibles in Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar!, as well as the saloontheatre traditions of the West, the third follows a struggling actor’s encounter with a dubious impresario. ALL GOLD CANYON Starring: Tom Waits, Sam Dillon
“This is the ‘Prospecting For Gold’ sub-genre,” says Nelson. “I don’t know if you’d call that Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. It’s not quite that. I’ll just say the prospector movie.” As with many chasing remuneration from the cold Coen universe, said prospector strikes it rich but comes undone in his attempts to keep it a secret. THE GAL WHO GOT RATTLED Starring: Zoe Kazan, Bill Heck, Ethan Dubin
The fifth is an example of what Nelson calls the ‘Covered Wagon’ sub-genre, which “goes back to John Wayne’s first movie, The Big Trail”. The story follows a “gal” on the Oregon Trail caught between two men, one a marriage prospect, the other a stranger who comes to her assistance. THE MORTAL REMAINS Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek, Tyne Daly
“This is your stagecoach chamber play that was explored by Quentin Tarantino recently,” explains Nelson, referring to The Hateful Eight. This circles five passengers heading for a mystery destination. Across all six tales, concludes Nelson, “are a halfdozen characters who think they have got it all figured out but they really don’t.” In other words: classic Coen brothers. IAN NATHAN