Review of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) by Ed%20 W — 18 Nov 2018

This being the Coen Brothers, the movie is every bit as beautifully well made as you would expect, and stuffed with crackling dialogue. The Bros Coen have an extraordinary talent for penning their patented, frontier-Shakespearian vernacular.

There are some terrific moments - Stephen Root, covered in homemade armour, excitedly screaming "Pan shot!" as he bears down on James Franco being a stand out for me.

But, perhaps Buster Scruggs himself taps into something when he complains that one of his nicknames is "The Misanthrope". One would guess this was a knowing, self-referential joke as you would never label the Coen brothers hugely optimistic fans of their fellow humans. But here it often felt as though the brother's natural leaning into the blackness outweighed the comedy to too great a degree - the directors' feet very much slipping over that line with the horribly bleak "Meal Ticket".

A film maker adopting a bleak world view is, of course, not a problem. But the film's anthology format didn't quite allow the stories time to carve out the depth needed to explore the darker themes satisfyingly, As a result, the uncharacteristically broad strokes the film's darker moments were painted with butted up a little jarringly against the comedy, Overall, and despite Buster Scrugg's protestations, the resulting film felt perhaps too overtly misanthropic to be as entertaining as one would normally expect of a Coen brother's production.

To be fair, the Coen Brothers have set themselves up to be judged by their own extraordinary standards. This would probably be a four star film if made by someone else but, when held against their own staggering body of work, one can't but find it a little lacking.