The Coens’ magnificent six
Screen winner Coen brothers deliver a five-star dazzler at Venice Film Festival
New Coen brothers film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was originally meant to be a multi-part television series comprising six offbeat tales from the old American West. But, at some point earlier this year, the project morphed into a standalone anthology film, of the type that flourished in the Sixties and Seventies. Cinema’s gain has been, well, TV’S gain too: the project was financed by Netflix, and will appear on the streaming service later this year, following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last Friday.
Half-fish, half-fowl and altogether inspired, it is a dazzling mosey through the creeks and canyons of the Coenesque, whose scattershot format and, by turns, bizarre and macabre sense of humour belie a formal ingenuity and surgical control of tone that keeps the viewer perpetually off guard.
All six stories are presented explicitly as fictions – successive chapters in a dusty, cloth-bound tome, each of which is introduced by a colour illustration that gives away (or does it?) one of the section’s defining images. Part one – “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” itself
– is a gonzo send-up of the singing cowboy genre, previously dabbled in by the Coens in Hail, Caesar!. Featuring Tim Blake Nelson as the eponymous “San Saba songbird”, and set among the coppery stacks and buttes of Monument Valley, its premise is that a warbling balladeer in a white 10-gallon hat could only survive five minutes in the wild west if he were… well, let’s leave the punchline to the film, but it’s a blunt, strong one that isn’t milked a moment longer than it need be. After that, you’re hustled on to the five other, more substantial yarns: “Near Algodones”, an Ambrose Bierce-flavoured tale of rough luck and rougher justice, starring James Franco as a bank robber; “Meal Ticket”, a cold snap of frontier gothic with Liam Neeson as a travelling showman and Harry Melling as his quadriplegic ward; “All Gold Canyon”, an American Dream parable with Tom Waits as a gnarled old prospector who stumbles on a heavenly cache; “The Gal Who Got Rattled”, a dose of sweeping John Ford classicism with Zoe Kazan on a wagon train to Oregon; and “The Mortal Wild West: Tim Blake Nelson in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Remains”, set during a moonlit stagecoach ride and featuring an audacious, maddening ending that sent a chill through my core.
All six share a common moral – life is cheap, death the deadest cert around – but each comes at it from a unique tonal and thematic angle, though always with the signature eccentric humour and sour-sweet tang of the Coens’ best work. Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who first collaborated with the brothers on 2013’s Inside Llewyn Davis, can shoot the American wilderness to match each and every mood here, from the mud-caked desolation of the Neeson segment (pure Mccabe & Mrs Miller) to the Arcadia of the Waits bit, with its rustling meadows and gilded light.
Singling out a favourite performance is tricky – though it should be said Waits is as good a contender as any. The Coens and their regular casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, have a knack for matching characters with faces, so that you get the measure of even the most minor supporting nobody in as much time as it takes them to clear their throat or squint. The casting is so spot on, the accuracy has a kind of comic punch – and never more so than in “The Mortal Remains”, in which six travelling companions rub one another up the wrong way as their carriage bears them off to… well, again, let’s just allow the film to play its hand. Tyne Daly plays an eyebrowarching scold straight out of a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler, Chelcie Ross a bloviating fur trapper, Saul Rubinek a rumbling French windbag, Jonjo O’neill a Mephistophelian spiv, Brendan Gleeson his singing business associate. Passenger number six? He’s a corpse, and is strapped to the roof.
They’re a wildly mismatched bunch, and bounce off one another in untidy, hectic ways. But placed alongside each other, they just click, like cylinders on a combination lock. They’re the entire film in miniature, of course.
To be released on Netflix later this year