The Coen brothers’ wild, wild West
Their aim is true in Netflix’s “Buster Scruggs.”
NEW YORK – When Joel and Ethan Coen announced last year that they were making an anthology series for Netflix, there was a lot of excitement from cinephiles and TV fans alike.
After all, the brothers are among the most visionary filmmakers working today, having created grisly Oscar-winning dramas (“No Country for Old Men,” “Fargo”) and star-studded offbeat comedies (“The Big Lebowski,” “Hail, Caesar!”).
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” which premiered Thursday at the New York Film Festival and hits Netflix and select theaters on Nov. 16, falls somewhere in between. Retooled as a two-hour movie, the sprawling Western is split into six idiosyncratic chapters, each telling stories with different characters and playing in genres such as slapstick comedy, tragic romance and existential horror. Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson and Zoe Kazan co-star as a goofy gunslinger, thieving cowboy, traveling showman and grieving pioneer.
The Coens started writing “Buster” 25 years ago but didn’t start thinking of how to bring it to the screen until about a decade ago. The varying lengths of each “episode” made it difficult for Netflix to package it as a TV show.
“That’s an artifact of what a strange animal it is, and (Netflix) didn’t know – none of us really knew – what to call it or how to classify it,” Joel Coen said during a festival news conference.
Its most entertaining chapters are its first two: In “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” Nelson plays a singing outlaw whose jaunty demeanor offsets his reputation as the sharpest shot in the West. He nimbly guns down foes in hilariously gruesome ways until he meets his match (Willie Watson) in a wacky musical showdown. Franco stars in the equally funny second chapter, “Near Algodones,” in which his character is sentenced to be hanged after a bank robbery gone awry. But when the lawmen who apprehended him are killed by a tribe of Native Americans, he’s stranded alone on his horse with a noose around his neck.
The longest and only female-centric story in “Buster” is “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” It follows a young woman named Alice Longabaugh (Kazan) who finds comfort in a wagon trail leader (Bill Heck) after the death of her brother.
Kazan said she appreciated being in a film with such a large ensemble cast.
“When you see a movie that you’re in, I spend like half the time (with my hands over my eyes),” Kazan said. “To know that I could watch like 80 percent of this movie happily was wonderful.”