Review of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) by Hnestlyonthesly — 12 Oct 2019

Netflix’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is probably only for Coen Brother completionists. The formal structure organizing these short stories is to be expected, but still feels fresh and innovative. The stories and actors themselves tell genre-busting tales of varying lengths, which in and of itself is a cool challenge to expectations, in the same vein as Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets. But not all of the stories are constructed with the same care and skill, leaving the overall effect a somewhat uneven ensemble cast of cameos that deserves to be watched as an afterthought on your laptop after escaping yet another holiday party but not so much on the big screen.

I never thought that I would root for an old prospector as he goes through the grueling process of panning for gold, but the objective frame for that story created a hero out of hard work. Magical realism abounds in the opening story of a bard-outlaw, and Zoe Kazan delivers an excellent, muted performance as the film’s only woman protagonist.

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The weaker stories seem self-evidently conscious of their mediocrity and preemptively invite apologetics, but their failings are cliché by now. James Franco (the worst of the Franco brothers–Dave, you are my spirit animal) gives an appropriately creepy performance to a morally intellectually bankrupt story in the second slot. Liam Neeson and Harry Melling (the Dursley boy of HP fame) either tell a twee story about the savagery of the theater and whimsy of public opinion or they impersonate a person with a physical disability and then throw him over a bridge in lieu of an actual ending.

If there is a connective tissue to these stories, it seems like it might be the mundanity of evil, but giving directorial side eye to the ethics of your own story is not the same thing as telling a story that challenges those evil outcomes, and I think that’s at the crux of my criticism with some of the endings in this collection, which sounds like a narrow point, I know, but actually has some big implications for the choices that could have been made.

Franco, Neeson, and Kazan’s stories all have essentially the same easy outcome and they arrive at that point because the stories paint themselves into a corner, where more interesting, open-ended avenues existed. Why do we need to see the cart at the end with only the chicken in its cage? Why not before? Why the suicide-as-plot when so much of the lead up is about the drama of her decisions, her future, and not that of Billy? Why the vacuous mooning? Why the rushed unfortunate turn? Death is still a viable ending, as “The Ballad” shows in the first story, but it’s not the only way.

For those looking for the high water mark of short stories done well on the big screen, check out 2014’s Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales), but The Ballad of Buster Scruggs went straight to streaming for a reason, and that reasoning is still not an entirely vetted path to success.