Review of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) by Torion O — 11 Nov 2018

This one's a mixed bag. What really drags it down is the amount of fluff surrounding the fun charm characteristic of the Coen brothers. The first and titular story is the best one of the six, and it's kind of a let-down after that.

An element I particularly liked running throughout each tale is the meta theme around storytelling itself. Buster Scruggs himself talks directly to the audience, a more blatant indicator of this from the get-go (though this purpose is cleverly masked with humor).

Once Buster Scruggs (spoilers) dies, it pulls the rug out from under the audience and the movie takes a turn that is overwhelmed with dolefulness such that the brief accounts of humor and charm are squashed.

On one hand, I admire the intrepidity of the film, much like the spirit of those in the Old West setting forth into harsh and unknown territory, but on the other hand it misses the mark. This is plain to see in the third tale "Meal Ticket" which is rather boring to watch and epitomizes the worst of the Coen brothers (which is, to say, not terrible but just useless and boring).

Essentially "Meal Ticket" is like No Country for Old Men but with (thankfully) less run-time so that the entire film isn't an anticlimactic bore-fest. That's not to say the story, or any of the other stories, didn't have a sense of closure, but the bulk of this film lacks life.

Life in the form of charismatic characters who aren't treated from a directorial standpoint with irreverence so that each character comes across as disposable set pieces with no qualities to be attached to.

This segues rather nicely into the last tale, in which the meta theme is pointed out (implicitly) by one traveler's monologue about the intriguing quality of storytelling. He mentions the characters are meant to be identified with, but not to the extent the audience is the same as the characters.

This particular tale brings the film some of its life back from the several travelers disturbing and comical dialogue, though it isn't exactly enough when the book closes and the credits start rolling.

I'll say that the film succeeds in de-romanticizing and de-glorifying the Old West, though how that hits is subjective. To me, it's as I stated above: overwhelmingly doleful and too often both useless and boring.

If you like the Coen brothers for their unique humor, you'll be at least 1/6 satisfied. That 1/6 is pretty much a guarantee for anything you're looking for out of the Coen brothers here, since it is a mixed bag featuring an array of what they have to offer.

Retrospectively, this isn't something I would want to see (save for the first tale and last tales). It also isn't something that has any value in re-watchability. A bit disappointing, but I'm not going to give this a bad score since I feel it isn't overall bad.