It’s hard not to watch The Ballad of Buster Scruggs from writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen without thinking how it would have played in its originally intended format of six-part Netflix mini-series. The skeletal remains are in evidence: the film is divided into six tales of characters making their way, by hook or by crook (mostly crook), through the vast American Midwest in the 1800s.
Here’s Buster in the opening story, played by Coens stalwart Tim Blake Nelson, strumming his guitar on horseback and singing a cowboy ditty with back-up provided by the echoes off the rocks in Monument Valley. But Buster is not so much singing cowboy as a cheerfully psychopathic gunslinger (did we mention this is a Coen brothers film?) and his 15-minute story ends in a series of exuberantly violent showdowns.
Next up is James Franco, in an equally enjoyable but slight tale of a would-be bank robber who gets more than his fair share of Wild West justice. We also get Tom Waits as a grizzled gold-digger with his eye on the prize, and Liam Neeson as a travelling showman whose act, for now, is the stirring oration of a limbless boy. But just when you start to wonder where it’s all going, the Coens deliver a beautifully crafted and devastating story (did we mention this is a Coen brothers film?) about a young woman (Zoe Kazan) trying to plot her future on the Oregon Trail, followed by a fiendishly Poe-etic coda about bounty hunters, played by Brendan Gleeson and Jonjo O’Neill.
Would The Ballad of Buster Scruggs have worked as a series? Notwithstanding the lengths of the stories vary, they don’t all have the structured pay-offs that might make them satisfying stand-alones. Taken together the cumulative effect of the adventures of Buster and company — the bleakness, the black humour, the grubby, amoral pragmatism — makes for an unconventional and stealthily affecting whole.
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
