The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

"You know the story. But... people can't get enough of them. Like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves I suppose. And we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us... but not us. Not us in the end especially. The midnight caller gets him, never me. I'll live forever."

 

I rarely run across a great film. I very, very... VERY rarely run across anything even bearable on Netflix, among the clutter of politically correct Friends knock-offs and 53 yearly zombie movies of the week. So while the Coen Brothers' name guarantee intrigued me enough to queue up The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, I went into it expecting some piece of contractually-obligated filler or such, and the title story, while not bad, strained just hard enough at being obvious to support that presumption.

Fortunately the rest of the vignettes picked up the slack. Sometimes soulful, sometimes macabre, sometimes wistful yet pervaded by Fargo-style dark humor throughout, they inevitably leave you grasping for a common thread. Most viewers seem to stop at the face value of the Western theme, and in fairness, pop-culture does seem about due for a revival of Wild West stories. The more high-brow line holds this was a movie about death, which certainly features in every segment. However, I increasingly got the impression of an homage to story-telling, and the last Huis Clos story cinched it.

 

Every character seems trapped in a personal fable, a scripted role. Tales, whether told to others or to oneself, can kill. Most scenes are as slow, trite and telegraphed as The Princess Bride, but the greater detail, from tiny shadows and noises to the CGI-glossed scenery Rob Reiner can only wish he'd had back in the '80s, fill in those potential gaps of dead air. You find yourself anticipating the details of the obvious reveal, actively predicting the clearly timed twist, engaged in the story, complicit to the storyteller by projecting edicts of life and death onto the life-and-death situations depicted. If nothing else, it certainly made me introduce the term doughface into my vocabulary.

As for the setting, I can't help thinking that stringing together six plays on storytelling expectations in a genre most would presume to know everything about is itself an act of rebellion. How far do even the celebrated Coen brothers have to go to be permitted to make a movie motivated by neither fad worship nor political convenience? How far do any of us have to reach for storytelling which can stand on its own merit, for a bit of honest lying? At the very least, farther back than Hearst.