Coens round up Western tales in ‘Buster Scruggs’
VENICE --- What are the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, up to with “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”?
The Oscar-winning duo behind “Fargo,” “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit,” has, with a cast that includes James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tyne Daly and Zoe Kazan, made six short films, all Westerns that they’ve written over many years.
“Though they were completely different in terms of mood, they were vaguely about the same thing,” Joel, 63, said. “It was interesting to put them together.”
“Buster” opens, galloping along with a singing cowboy who is a danged deadly sureshot. Then there’s the would-be bank robber who’s strung up to be hung, when a marauding band of Indians shows up.
Another story follows a carny from camp to camp with his star exhibit, a legless and armless man who recites the Gettysburg Address, Shakespeare and other prose for pennies.
“I read ‘Buster Scruggs’ in 2002,” said Tim Blake Nelson, who stars as the singing cowboy. “What we all cherish in what Joel and Ethan do is this deep sense of film history, which is obvious in the movie.”
He sees “Buster Scruggs” as “a history of the Western from the singing cowboy to the black-hatted rock ’n’ roll revisionist Western almost out of ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller.’
“Each of the other five stories examines an aspect of the Western and shows, with the Coens’ strong visual sense, the history of this world.”
Joel said, “We wanted specific different landscapes for each story. We shot all over, the Rockies, western Nebraska for the covered wagon story, Santa Fe.
“There were specific western landscapes for each of the different stories and that was an important part of the undertaking for us.
“We had a clear idea from the beginning what the sequence of stories was --even though they weren’t written in that order. The movies,” he added, “run a progression of starting out overly comedic and becoming increasingly somber as the picture goes on. But there wasn’t a recipe for it. It was just what felt right.”
Produced by Netflix, Joel emphasized that the theatrical and streaming “Buster” are the same. “This version is the version, nothing is going to change.”
“A theatrical release was important to us,” Ethan, 61, said. “So that people who want to see it on a big screen are able to do so.”