‘Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ explores the West in six very different ways

Posted on December 14, 2018

By MARK VIOLA

Perhaps the rarest type of film release today is the anthology, a series of shorts connected by either story, theme or genre. In recent years, nearly every anthology film I can think of resides in the horror genre, aside from one notable comedy that is notable only due to how bad it was. (I will refrain from mentioning the title to avoid dredging up bad memories for those who had the misfortune of seeing it.)

Meanwhile, more and more films each year are being released by online streaming services, especially Netflix, which usually gives its movies a token run in theaters — if any at all — before debuting online, and Amazon, which does more theatrical releases with such films as “Manchester by the Sea” and “Wonderstruck.” Although Netflix is breaking its own rules with “Roma” (see my preview below), it’s unlikely you’re going to see most Netflix-produced films in a theater.

This is why I saw “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” the latest film from Ethan and Joel Coen (“No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski”), on my computer screen rather than the big screen. The anthology Western is a series of six short stories, framed as if we, the audience, were reading from a collection of short stories about the Wild West. There are no connections between the stories aside from the genre (although eagle-eyed viewers may catch a couple of obscure references to the Coens’ film, “True Grit”).

The tales range from the downright farcical to the brutally depressing, with a decided lean toward the latter. As such, the episodic nature of the film is beneficial so as to not overload the emotions. I watched “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” over the course of several days as time allowed, with each story running about 20 minutes, and the entire film topping out at two hours, 13 minutes.

I’m a big fan of short fiction, because writers tend to have the freedom to tell stories that could never hold up over the course of a tradition novel or feature film, but will captivate within a limited amount of pages or time. That is the case with the stories contained in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” and there really isn’t a false note among them. Each is extremely well filmed, written and acted, providing a variety of takes on Western genre. Do note the film’s R rating, which is mostly due to its bloody violence, which often comes without warning.

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