Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival
Anthology films always have a bit of an under-cooked quality - you like a chunk of meat here, a chunk of potato there, but the stew's uneven, the broth skinned over from sitting. Even the very best ones can feel haphazard - you can and should certainly argue that Pulp Fiction is an anthology film, albeit one that's po-mo'd up in glorious fashion, but some days you're just not in the mood for Honey Bunny, ya dig? The Coens' six-part The Ballad of Buster Scruggs maintains that streak - highs, lows, and everything in between, slapped between two fraying book covers...
The Ballad is told book-style with a godly hand sweeping in, plying the pages one by one for us, introducing its chapters. It starts with Coen regular Tim Blake Nelson as a singing cowboy complete with neighing horse accompaniment, and ends with Tyne Daly as a holier-than-thou done-up frump situated among weirdos on a stagecoach bound for... well that'd be a spoiler, lil' darlin.
Alongside Tyne the only other substantial role for a woman here is a real heartbreaking little ditty about a wagon train starring Zoe Kazan, who catches the eye of an attractively bedraggled Bill Heck. If you're looking for the Coens to up-end the genre by telling the stories of the unexpected you'll come away unsatisfied. There's nothing revolutionary a la Meek's Cutoff happening here for these prairie mistresses. For all their visual verve and way around a joyful non-sequitur, for all their truly resplendent way of committing acts of violence, these stories of the Coens turn out to be as old and dusty as the gold in them thar hills.
I suppose it's built into the pie (or the stew, to slide us back to our first paragraph's metaphor), but I expected more shake-up from the Coens - I laughed and gee-whizzed at some of their typical goof-ball antics (and Carter Burwell's music is a real treat, per usual) but nothing here feels terribly vital. There is no "opening scene to A Serious Man" level small storytelling astoundment hanging round.
And that's before we even get to the film's straight up devilish treatment of its Native Americans, who haunt its edges as horror and that's that, which reads like a forceful head-in-the-sand approach from the Brothers. Yes you can excuse yourself by saying the presentation calls for this kind of old-fashioned approach, but... why? What good is that for? (To quote Maya Rudolph as Dionne Warwick, "To what end?") It's not a good look, boys - mosey up with the times or the times will mosey on without ya.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays on October 9th at 8:45 PM and October 14th at 12:00 PM