Those stories are all tied together by Leonard’s writing style, and even when they don’t overlap in any way, they feel as part of the whole. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is tied together mostly by the theme of death. Each story contains death like a cloud hanging over the characters, and each story ends up with at least one character dead, even the two stories that only contain two characters. Sometimes the deaths are comical, in the twisted Coen tradition, mostly they’re not. Death is almost just part of the landscape of the west, whether it’s disease, murder, suicide, or even unknown causes. As always with the Coen’s, there’s humor here, but mostly contained to the first two stories. Taken as a whole or taken individually, these stories stick with you one way or another. The Coen's also use a framing device as though these stories are all part of a western collection of short stories in a book called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, complete with painted stills taken from each story.
I’m just gonna cover each one, so that (like the Coen’s) I make sure each gets its due.
1. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character of the piece here, one who sets us up to think that maybe he’ll be our narrator throughout the movie (he isn’t, the 6 stories are totally self contained) as he breaks the fourth wall, talking directly to us about himself and who he is. We first see him casually riding his horse Dan, singing the classic western song “Cool Water”, most often associated with Roy Rogers. This is the Coen’s take on the singing cowboy genre, obviously, except our hero here is a swift shooting son of a gun who kills damn near everyone who crosses his path, maybe unless they’re singing with him.
Nelson has such a wonderful command of the Coen’s flowery dialog and effortlessly sells his abilities as a white hatted singing cowboy, but also as the fastest and deadliest gun in the West. We see why the name Buster Scruggs is known by folks from all around. This sequence is also the lightest in atmosphere, despite being the most graphic in its violence. When the end of the chapter takes a flight of fancy, I went with it easily because the Coen’s had set up so much the ridiculous tone to a farcical level on par with their Raising Arizona, so the fantastical and ridiculous seemed to fit right in.
A 9/10 for this one from me.
2. Near Algodones
In this chapter, a young man (James Franco) comes into a small town bank and sticks up the teller (Coen regular Stephen Root) before the teller rebels and knocks Franco unconscious. Franco awakens to a rope around his neck and men asking him for his last words (and if they can have his horse after he’s dead). Things both do and don’t get better for Franco after this.
A kind of take on stories where things just can’t seem to go right for the hero, as it’s just one thing after another until the inevitable end for this poor unlucky bastard. It’s also evocative of the old Leone spaghetti westerns, as there seems to always be someone getting hanged in those movies. Franco is fine in the role, but this is the slightest of all the chapters even if it also has my favorite moment in the movie, with Franco’s delivery of the line “first time?” But I believe it's also the shortest, so it's not like it outstays its welcome.
A 6/10 for this one.
3. Meal Ticket
The saddest of the stories is this chapter about a man (Liam Neeson) who drives from town to town in a wagon that can transform into a stage, where we see the armless and legless “orator”, Harrison. Harrison recites, wonderfully and charismatically, classics such as Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, sonnets from Shakespeare, the biblical story of Cain and Abel, and the Gettysburg Address. Neeson then collects donations from the ever dwindling crowds before they’re off to the next town.
Neeson is quite good in a mostly wordless performance, reminding what a talented actor he can be, how much screen presence he has. He may have taken on too many shitty action movies at this point in his career (although he does those well too) that sometimes we forget that he’s a terrific and powerful actor at his best. Harrison is played beautifully by Harry Melling, best known on screen as Harry Potter’s awful cousin Dudley Dursley. Here, Melling is the opposite of Dudley. He’s sad, talented, tragic, lonely, and effortlessly relatable as the invalid completely at the mercy of his caretaker. This is the saddest of the chapters, but also one of the best.
A 9/10 for this chapter.
4. All Gold Canyon
In this chapter, based on a Jack London short story, Tom Waits plays an old prospector searching rivers for gold and digging holes looking for a big pocket of gold, a pursuit he talks to himself as looking for “Mr. Pocket.” Another aspect of the western story tradition, the gold prospector, but it's never starred Tom Waits before. I actually wish this one was a little longer, as Waits is so infinitely and easily watchable that you just want more.
Waits is so perfect for the Coen’s it really makes you surprised when you realize this is the first time they’ve worked together. He’s funny and sad and endlessly fascinating to watch, just as always. And since most of All Gold Canyon is just Waits on screen, that works to perfection. We get to know his character; he’s hard working, good humored, and even though he’s a gold prospector, he’s not greedy or entitled. We even see him put back the eggs he takes from an owl nest after he sees the owl looking at him. He feels guilty for taking all the eggs and so puts them all back but one, which he takes for his meal. This section is the most easily lovable of any of the chapters and it’s nice that they put it here in the middle.
Another 9/10 on this section from me.
5. The Girl Who Got Rattled
Zoe Kazan stars in this chapter, the longest of the bunch, as a woman on a wagon train to Oregon, who loses her brother to cholera and must figure out what she’ll do now, since they were headed to Oregon for her brother to do business, she’s left with few prospects and no money, not even to pay the boy who’s driving her wagon for her. Bill Heck plays Mr. Knapp, a sympathetic cowboy co-leading the wagon train, who sincerely wants to help out Kazan in her time of need.
This is what the Coen's doing a sweet little romance looks like, I guess. I love it. This is my favorite of the chapters. And another shade of the western tackled, the wagon train. Kazan (back on a similar Oregon bound wagon trail as she was in Meeks Cutoff) is really engaging, and I loved the sweet and developing chemistry she has with the kindly cowboy that Bill Heck plays. Maybe because this is the longest of chapters, but it’s the one that most feels like it could’ve been expanded into its own feature. It’s perfect as it is, but I wouldn’t have complained about another hour of this. It has the most developed characters, the most intriguing storyline and the actors are all wonderful.
10/10, this is my favorite of the bunch.
6. The Mortal Remains
To close out the anthology, the Coen's take us into the stagecoach style western story, but here with an ominous and ultimately unsettling tone. Five people are in a stagecoach together, a random bunch: on one side a French gambler (Saul Rubinek), a fur trapper (Chelcie Ross), and an elderly proper lady (Tyne Daly). On the other side, a snappily dressed Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill) and an Irishman (Brendan Gleeson). The coach is going to Fort Morgan, and over the course of the journey we find out that the lady is reuniting with her husband, and O'Neill and Gleeson are bounty hunters delivering a body.
Ross's fur trapper is the most memorable character, as he talks loudly, often, and in a way that's offensive to the proper conservative lady that Daly plays to perfection. But the journey takes a turn as it becomes obvious that we're not where we think we are. When the lady becomes upset, the Frenchman calls out to the stagecoach driver to stop, which he doesn't do, and the Englishman informs them that the coach never stops before its destination. Never. When the Frenchman pops his head outside, the world doesn't look right, it looks stormy and forbidding and definitely not the Colorado countryside. We come to realize that three such people as the Frenchman, lady, and fur trapper would not be in the same company going to the same place. The fur trapper even says he rarely sees people, so why is he on the coach in the first place? What we come to realize is that this is a ferry to the afterlife and the "bounty hunters" are simply the guides of these three disparate souls.
To end the story on this kind of note, literally the end of life at the end of a set of stories about death, is just so perfect as the finale. And when the coach stops at a hotel for the night, the three souls seem to be realizing what's going on. There's a certain gallows humor to the lady still insisting on being helped off the coach, because they're all seeming to understand what's going on now. But the final note of the symphony is note jokey, but somber, as it should be. It makes for a powerful ending for the story and even more so for the anthology as a whole.
An 8/10 on this.
Overall, the Coen's have delivered one of their best movies, one that I've already watched twice and will watch many more times over the years. I love westerns, and so do the Coen's. Thankfully, they make great ones. I hope this gets some love come awards season, as Netflix has released it briefly in theaters specifically for awards consideration. This movie deserves the love. And I didn't even talk about the gorgeous cinematography or music. Both are among my favorites in the Coen catalog (cinematography by the great Bruno Delbonnel, who has become like their secondary director of photography if Roger Deakins is unavailable, and music by Carter Burwell, as usual for the Coen's).
Overall, even though only one of the six stories got a 10/10 from me, I give the whole movie a 10/10 because the stories feel of a whole, they inform and elevate each other even as they stay separate. And I love the way the Coen's did the book tying things together by feeling like we're going between chapters of this short story collection. This, at least to my mind right now, is the only anthology movie I love wholeheartedly.
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