OVP: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

Film: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Stars: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Original Song-"When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings," Costume Design, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Anthology films are such a strange affair.  In a world where television exists, and is pretty much what we exclusively associate episodic narratives with in terms of visual entertainment, it feels quaint but wholly unnecessary to have something like a Buster Scruggs coming in with its six distinct stories.  After all, we have reboots of The Twilight Zone and anthology series like Black Mirror that already fill this hole, so the Coen Brothers going after such a largely extinct cinematic genre feels at once exciting and a bit of a retread.  This is also true of the film itself.  While the movie has the distinct, unmistakable voice of the Coen Brothers, it also comes with some of the baggage of what clogged up anthology films in general: tricky messaging, uneven stories where some are clearly better than others, and a lack of proper resolution.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is cut into six segments, each starring at least one noteworthy star or important Coen Brothers player.  The title comes from the first segment, where a singing cowboy akin to Roy Rogers or Gene Autry named Buster Scruggs (Nelson) is wandering aimlessly along the countryside decked in all-white, and while he seems like a Gomer Pyle-sort of figure, he's actually incredibly violent, a quick draw whose skills should only be tested by those with a death wish.  We see him defeat in rough order three men, all-the-while keeping a sunny disposition and a hum in his voice, before he ultimately is taken down by a man-in-black with little to no resolution as to why.  It's here where the cheeky, but dismissible, Oscar-nominated song makes its appearance in the film.

This is all fun and well-acted, but it's also a harbinger of most of the stories to come in that you don't entirely get the point.  There's a lack of resolution, but more importantly a lack of crispness to the writing.  The film's unifying theme is death, with all of the tales featuring a pivotal demise driving the conclusion save the final one, where it's heavily implied the main protagonists were deceased the whole time.  Sometimes the stories are better than others; "The Gal Who Got Rattled," anchored by Zoe Kazan (if you've read this blog before you know that I'm not Kazan's biggest fan, so that I choose her over segments starring Daly, Franco, & Waits should say something), where she plays a young woman who is undone by bad timing & misfortune, is interesting and adds a dash of romance to an otherwise thoroughly unromantic film, but it's also the only story where there's a clear ending to the picture.  Ambiguity in an ending is great, and the Coen Brothers do it better than pretty much anyone this side of Woody Allen, but it's also a cop out if you just sort of present stories with none of them finding absolution.

This movie is easily watchable, and in the hands of the Coen Brothers, it's not like you're getting something bad, but it's also a movie that just sort of sits there.  With the exception of the final two installments (starring Kazan & Daly), I didn't feel like there was more to expand upon in this universe, which shouldn't be the case for a short story (where you're left wanting more) and certainly shouldn't be the case with ambiguity in the ending.  I don't mind a negative or dark finish (which all of the stories save for "All Gold Canyon" have), but I feel like these stories are incomplete, and frequently inconsistent in their narrative quality.  The film's costumes (its third Oscar nomination in addition to citations for writing and music), are also in-the-middle, with the inspired white suit of Buster Scruggs (considering his violence, a novel contradiction, enough to make us rethink our opinion of the man-in-black who overcomes him) an outlier in what is otherwise pretty routine western wear from Mary Zophres.  Overall, I feel like this is a lesser installment in the Coen Brothers filmography, a nice enough way to spend an evening but nothing particularly noteworthy.