The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ***** (2018, Tim Blake Nelson, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, James Franco, Jonjo O’Neill, Liam Neeson) – Movie Review

Writer-directors Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s lovingly respectful homage movie The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) is first of all a haunting work of art, and second a beautiful toast to the Western movie and the vanished west, and third a sweet and lovely entertainment.

I’ve never been a big fan of the episodic compendium movie, but here the Coen Brothers make it work as best it ever could, as their six stories glide along seamlessly together and form one single organic unit.

It kicks off with the segment The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, with Tim Blake Nelson charismatic as the singing, smiling – and killing – cowboy Buster Scruggs, and finishes with the doomy The Mortal Remains with Tyne Daly, Jonjo O’Neill, Brendan Gleeson and Saul Rubinek on a coach ride to hell, though sudden, violent death is the theme, or at least pattern, for the whole movie.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is very amusing, sometimes very funny, but is is also occasionally very violent. At any rate, it is all very Coen Brothers. Returning to the entrancing form of their 2013 London Film Festival entry Inside Llewyn Davis, they are officially forgiven for their last movie, Hail, Caesar! (2016).

Who else to praise? Certainly Tom Waits for his old gold prospector in the segment All Gold Canyon, Zoe Kazan for her bereaved Alice Longabaugh on the wagon train in the segment The Gal Who Got Rattled, and James Franco for his bank robbing cowboy in the segment Near Algodones. All the casting and the performances are simply perfection. Everybody looks like they have been working in Westerns for years, just like the Western stars and character actors of yore. Actually they look like they have been living in the Old West for years. Most of them look proper sweaty and dirty, though that of course does not include the pristine singing cowboy Buster Scruggs.

An obvious total labour of love, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks so great that it is breathtaking. It sounds great too. Music and song propel the film along. Carter Burwell’s score and Bruno Delbonnel’s cinematography and Jess Gonchor’s production designs are works of art too.

At 132 minutes, this is, perhaps surprisingly, the longest film directed by the Coen Brothers. The time just slips by, at the end you are hoping for just one more story, then maybe another, and another, a neverending story. It ends on a dangerous downbeat note. Maybe the Coen Brothers should have brought back the singing cowboy Buster Scruggs to sing one more song at the end to cheer us up and send us happily on our way. But then that wouldn’t be the Coen Brothers, would it?

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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