‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ Is a Treatise on Death in Six Parts

The Coens are obsessed with death.

Death, whether inevitable, undeserved, cruel or amusing, has perforated their movies right since the beginning. However, it has taken them a good 35 years to finally give death its own stage.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an anthology of six shorts (some written and developed in the nineties) that take place in the Old West. Nothing is as fertile for death as the Old West considering the frequent usage of guns, and the six shorts have plenty of them.

What mainly differentiates the six shorts though is the range of tones straddled by them. It's not stuff you haven't seen the Coens do before. We get a musical, a farce, a romance, a one-man show, a closed-room faceoff, all of them within the framework of the Western. In anyone else's hands, this would've been a mess. It's easy to say with anthologies that you get so many films for the price of one but it holds true here.

Death hung over the Coens’ 2009 movie, A Serious Man. That movie dug into the premise that the premonition of death follows a bad deed or any act carried out for selfish motivations.

In ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’, however, death has no rhyme nor reason. Remember the poem ‘Death The Leveller’ by James Shirley? “Death lays its icy hands on kings,” went one of the more famous lines of that poem. In agreement, “death comes for everyone,” say the Coens.

There are characters here who are nigh invincible, people who almost fall to death before beating it in the head, people who escape death by pure luck only for death to put its ace on the table. The Coens fill this journey with plenty of poetry, laughs, oratorship and music.

Take, for instance, Buster Scruggs himself, played charismatically by now Coen-regular Tim Blake Nelson in the first short, also called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. (Spoilers for the first short follow in this paragraph.) Buster is the “top dog” of the Wild West. He takes delight in being known as a misanthrope and an outlaw. He pulls off the wackiest tricks with his guns, seemingly coming across to others as an obstacle that is insurmountable. But the Coens know that death waits and bides its time, slowly and surely tallying the number of lives Buster has claimed until his own time is up. It befits Buster, then, that he too dies by the gun; he lived by it after all. And so, the cycle of violence continues and the only victor is death.

The fourth short, All Gold Canyon, starring a phenomenal Tom Waits as a hardworking prospector, comes closest to following the cause-and-effect dealings of death. However, that short is an anomaly. It’s a feel-good moment that is enveloped by gloom. It’s a tossup between the third short, Meal Ticket, and the fifth short, The Gal Who Got Rattled, for the most tragic tale that death rendered in the West.

Meal Ticket follows Liam Neeson’s impresario as he goes from town-to-town, come rain or snow, with his wagon that works as a makeshift stage for the artist Harrison (Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies, being a revelation). Harrison is a youngster with no limbs but is blessed when it comes to the oratory. He always recites the same passages: Shelley’s Ozymandias, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare and the Gettysburg Address. Each rendition is spirited, intense and powerful. That doesn’t matter for Neeson’s character though because fewer crowds are showing up for the act. The Coens build up the dread as the environs go white due to the snow, and you can see what’s coming, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t landed a sock on your jaw.

The fifth short, The Gal Who Got Rattled, follows Zoe Kazan’s Alice as she sets out in a wagon train to Oregon with her hopeless brother, who ends up dead as soon as they leave. You’d think this is a set-up for a classic Coen tongue-in-cheek story. However, they turn the tables around, and Alice begins getting close to Billy (played by Bill Heck), one of the wagon train’s leaders, and what follows is one of the tenderest stories they have put on screen after Fargo. Try not to feel down-and-out after this short.

This isn’t the first time the Coens have traversed into the milieu of the West. However, this is the first time they bring along Inside Llewyn Davis collaborator cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel for the ride.

This coincidentally also marks the first time the Coens have shot in digital. And if they faced any problems due to the transition from film to digital, we wouldn’t know because the movie looks great.

I wanted to live, especially, in All Gold Canyon, in the mirage-like setting in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, The Gal Who Got Rattled too has all the makings of an epic with Delbonnel and the Coens panning across the vistas of the desert with only the wagon trains providing any evidence of civilisation.

Delbonnel, though, brings out all his guns in the last short, The Mortal Remains. He’s constricted here as the majority of the short takes place in a carriage transporting five passengers and a corpse going… somewhere. However, the lighting he conjures in this short, pouring an equally intoxicating and dastardly mix of blue and green into the carriage and onto its commuters’ faces, is enough to put a spell on you, just as Thigpen (played by Jonjo O’Neill) and Clarence (played by Brendan Gleeson) do with their tales of being carriers of corpses.

It is in The Mortal Remains that the Coens go entirely meta. They know their audience by now and they love being playful about it. Joel and Ethan Coen could easily be Thigpen and Clarence, they could be death even. They could be masters of puppets, trigger-happy, laughing down with a god's eye view of us. However, just like this movie, they also can be bruising and affectionate, in the most unexpected of moments.