Six shorts comprise one film. Each short story – and they are explicitly framed as short stories, with images of text from a book and an old-school color plate – is distinct, with no character overlap. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is apparently not a real book. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote these stories years ago and then put them into a drawer until Lo! A star Netflix deal is born.
The Coens are masters of filmmaking craft, and each story sets up quickly, and is easy to follow and engaging – no easy feat. Each short takes on an iconic trope of the old West: 1) singing cowboy gunfighter, 2) outlaw hanging, 3) impresario/traveling showman, 4) panning for gold, 5) wagon train headed for Oregon, and 6) strangers in a stagecoach.
Each story contrasts the pristine beauty of the old West with jarring violence. The outlaw hanging, with the outlaw nicely played/well cast by James Franco, takes “gallows humor” to new and truly laugh-out-loud heights. My favorite story was the wagon train, in which Zoe Kazan sensitively plays a timid woman starting to see possibilities for her life. I found the stagecoach conclusion confusing, but all the other stories were cohesive and compelling. This movie is well crafted and absolutely worth seeing.
This movie is available on Netflix, which financed it. Having conquered TV, Netflix has moved on to movies.
The Judge 