Review: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix 2018)

[Content warnings on violence and abuse]

It doesn’t take much to convince me to watch a Coen Brother’s movie but I’m really not sure what I watched. It’s not the violence (which is frequent) that is disturbing but the repeated air of darkness joined with strong (often sumptuous) images that combine to form a nightmare quality.

Told as a portmanteau film of six Western stories, even the structure is more reminiscent of ghost stories. That’s not to say the stories themselves are ghost stories (although the first has a man’s soul leave his body and the last one strongly hints at a supernatural events).

The settings are an intentionally confused mishmash of Western genres. An immaculately dressed singing cowboy engaged in Tarantino-esque shoot outs, aging prospectors, city-slickers, rough frontier justice and wagon trains to Oregon. The stories are each separate but the shift from one to another feels vertiginous.

This is not a deconstruction of the Western genre nor a celebration of it. Rather events sit within an uncritical and unexamined framework of the genre as different characters deal with vagaries of death and morality. In particular, Native Americans are presented simply as a recurring ‘savage’ threat — which makes sense in the context of reproducing the genre and reproducing the prejudices that informed the genre but also, therefore, reproduces the prejudices of the genre.

The most disturbing of the six stories, Meal Ticket, is an almost dialogue-free story about an actor with no limbs who performs in a tiny travelling theatre operated by an old man (Liam Neeson). Characters rarely speak to each other in the story. Instead, the spoken words are primarily the actors repeated performances (reciting ‘Ozymandis’, parts of Genesis and The Gettysburg Address). The contrast between the tiny theatre and the bleak, wintery surroundings of the frontier towns, amplifies the nightmare quality to the story, along with the repetition and looming sense of violence.

I can’t say I’d want to recommend this but I also can’t deny that the sum total of it is something I found extraordinary. It is the sort of film that gets stuck in your head both with its narratives and visuals. There’s probably not a good time or right mood for a film like this.