The ballad of Buster Scruggs - a review

Six stories –all taking place in the ol’ West. Six stories that are morbid to a fault. Six stories that’ll make you laugh, wonder, and feel miserable. Six bullets to a revolver...

Now this is my kind of silly! The ballad of Buster Scruggs is a dark (a bit too dark at times) collection of stories that skilfully manoeuvres between heart-wrenching and hilarity. The best way one could describe this anthology tale is like an ‘updated version of Tales from the Crypt’.

But, where, in the early nineties all the characters in those macabre tales should be unlikable just so the audience wouldn’t mind their inevitable demise much; nowadays times sure have changed.

After movies like Se7en (1995), Fight club (1999), even the Coen’s brothers very own Fargo (1996) and True Grit (2010), audiences have warmed up to the notion of a ‘reasonably good guy’ getting the short end of the stick in drama.

‘Good-guys failing’ is no longer solely reserved for the horror and war genre.

In contemporary drama it is, nowadays, rather common for ‘our’ hero to find him-/herself

in a bigger pickle at the end than when the movie started.

And this is what the Coen brothers use for maximum effect in The ballad of Buster Scruggs. Which, unfortunately is also the biggest critique reviewers can give this movie: ‘We might know that evil triumphing over good is commonplace nowadays but can’t you please give use something? Anything?’
The answer by the Coen brothers is a blunt: ‘No!’

Intermezzo: The hurt factor.
The difference between comedy and melodrama is the ‘amount it hurts’.
Imagine a scene in which a guy is walking down the street and a flowerpot falls on his head (Yes, it’s an old Donald Duck cartoon –and (yes) it serves my purpose). In a melodrama his skull would crack -blood spurting out; he would die on the spot. Then, to ‘use this momentum’ the lover of this poor man would run towards his body and cry her hearth out. In short this scene would probably last for, at least, five minutes.

The same scene: a flowerpot falls and lands on a guy’s head. He is dumbstruck for a moment and, during that time, accidentally pulls a police-officer’s pants down. The officer gets angry and chases the man down the streets.
Now the focus is quickly directed to the pants-less officer, not the ‘horrific event’ that just occurred to the poor protagonist.

Less drama, less ‘hurt’, is the difference between  melodrama and comedy, and it is the oldest trick in the book!

More recently Shazam (2019) used this exact same trick on a smaller scale. Here the protagonist meets a handicapped boy. But the boy in question is a loudmouthed joker. He hates his handicap, obviously, but he’d be damned if he is bothered by it. So the boy cracks jokes about his handicap.
By dismissing the (obvious) handicap in a comedic manner the moviemakers are allowed to push some (melo)drama to the boy on another level. In the case of Shazam: The boy doesn’t have any friends.

We, the audience, realize that his handicap (and maybe his way of coping: his loud mouth) might have something to do with it in the backs of our mind. But these possible reasons become background noise to the ‘current’ melodramatic aspect.

In short: you can have a character go through all kinds of (mortal) ordeals and let him brush it off. But when you allow the camera to stay with the event, when you focus, the (melo) drama creeps in.
That’s how you write a (comedy) movie. And that is exactly what the Coen brothers do ‘per excellence’ in The ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Six stories
There as six stories being told in The ballad of Buster Scruggs. And, even though the stories don’t overlap in characters, they do overlap in thematic.
Just to give you a short summary of the stories:

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Buster Scruggs is a singing gunslinger who is too perfect for the world he is in. And maybe he’s right.

Near Algodones
A nameless bank robber finds luck and desolation a he ‘pulls the job of a lifetime’.

Meal Ticket
A handicapped entertainer finds his art in danger because the ‘real’ world is creeping in.

It took me a while to recognize the actor – but eyes always stay the same.

All Gold Canyon
A gold-digger finds his gold in the most beautiful of places. Only when he is gone will beauty return –one way or another.

The Gal Who Got Rattled
A woman is on her way to Oregon. But the dog keeps chasing her and she doesn’t have the heart to stop the animal.

The Mortal Remains
Five people on a coach. Destination: the same end.

Each of these stories is as solid as they can be. The ‘hook’ of each story can be surmised in a single sentence. The plot itself might take two more, but not much. The basic ‘tree’ of each story of this movie is simplicity itself. Now it is up to the scriptwriter and the director(s) to but some branches/meat on this tree-or: skeleton.
And this is where, usually, the problems happen.

No perfection Nevada
When writing, direction, or even editing a movie, you are in danger of ‘bloating’ said movie.
Any movie is a story from A to Z. The style or words might be different but still the basis remains. If it is Bollywood, Hollywood or Nollywood movie: each movie, ever made, has a beginning and an end.

It’s the time in-between that’s important.

A movie can spent too much time on things that don’t matter for the (A to Z) story.
One of my favourite ‘bad movies’, for instance, (Haemoglobin -1997) has a pretty long sex-scene that has no purpose whatsoever except for the reconfirmation that the two main characters love each other. The same gist I got five minutes before in the single line of dialogue that said: ‘I love you!’.

So that sex scene was only ‘thrown in’ to please the audience on ‘another level’.

So a movie should be constructed as such that there aren’t a lot of unnecessary scenes (or long scenes) muddling up the main (A to Z) road.

Unfortunately The ballad of Buster Scruggs (like many other movies before and after) fails to do so. But why? This has everything to do with the story the movie is telling at the time in context to the ‘whole’ of the movie.

Too long, but why?
Two of the stories in The ballad of Buster Scruggs tend to overstay its welcome: Meal Ticket and The Gal Who Got Rattled. Both stories are both a bit too long to keep the audience (me) interest/‘invested’. This mainly has to do with the placement of the two episodes in whole of the movie.

By the time these stories appear we’ve already sat through two pretty dark tales so we know that chances are quite high that the next story won’t end happily ever after either.

Keep in mind that the prints shown before each story are a bit of a spoiler.

So a viewer dilemma occurs. On the one hand you want (for example) a ‘love story’, or, a ‘road to riches story’ to reach its end successfully, yet, on the other you know ‘darn well’ that that’s not likely to happen

Knowing what kind of movie you are in prevents said movie to play certain trump cards on you. Each scene needed for the fictional tale of two people falling in love ‘feel unnecessary by context’ because you/the viewer knows that things won’t work out anyway. So why bother?


A great movie might manage to make the audience forget about ‘what kind of movie they are watching’, But, even though The ballad of Buster Scruggs tries (All Gold Canyon) it simply doesn’t manage to play with its audience as it set out to do.

Fixing the fault
A simple fix would be to place either of those two stories at the beginning of the tale. But apart from not being able to call this movie The ballad of Buster Scruggs no-more, one should also realize that neither The meal ticket or The Gal Who Got Rattled are show-openers!
As any entertainer knows you need something mesmerizing to open a show with. And, in The ballad of Buster Scruggs, a singing cowboy might just have to do.

Mentally re-cutting The ballad of Buster Scruggs I would’ve cut-up The meal ticket-story

 and used each of the artist’s speeches (watch the movie, you’ll know what I mean) as an interlude to each new tale.

Then, as a final scene I would end the tale as it ended in ‘our current version’.

Leaving the cinema-audience bleak, dark and (above all) shocked.

Still a (gun) blast
Having that said the dialogue is wonderfully written throughout this anthology. Especially noteworthy is the dialogue in The Gal Who Got Rattled. Each scene of her talking to her (possible) lover oozes of innuendo.

Did her brother die from dysentery? I really want to know!

I would be a shame if he didn’t – I’m just talking for the ‘Gamer generation’ here.

But, this being a script movie first (as all the Coen brothers movies basically are) every scene is deliciously written and, above all, deliciously acted. The mad banker (played by a wonderful Stephen Root) in Near Algodones could’ve said the words any kind of way but it was decided to use this particular style.
The same goes for the ‘trapper’ (Chelcie Ross) in The Mortal Remains who has a wonderful, awe-inspiring, monologue that just won’t end.
Just two actors delivering lines. But where the first actor used pitch of voice the second actor mainly used tempo to deliver his lines.
Regardless: still the lines remain.

Combining this with wonderfull shots of the western landscape and you’ve got yourself quite the mesmerizing piece of filmic fiction.

Still, in the end, The ballad of Buster Scruggs might be a bit too bleak in its message to win over anybody else but the Coen-enthusiasts. A shame really. But not something I’m particularly worried about. The brothers have found their own style of storytelling ages ago and are going with it. The movies they make might not appeal to the general audience but are great, well made, movies all the same.