6.The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen 

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Zoe Kazan

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs lavishes the classical genre with love while nonetheless dissecting it with a sharp analytical eye. Laced with a fatalism that’s emblematic of their finest work, the Coens’ six tales progress from jaunty to gloomy, although there’s plenty of humor and pessimism to be found in each of these captivating installments.  A six-part Western anthology, centered upon a common theme: the Wild West’s relentless cruelty, wanton violence, deadly recklessness, and cavalier abuses of unchecked power. As with much of their best work, the stories all revolve around absurd twists and fatalistic endings, but with an uncanny visual sheen that gives it the weight of beloved old folk tales. Even for experienced film makers like the Coen Brothers, the anthology format, where a series of shorts are presented as a feature, is a tough challenge to conquer.

A bountiful anthology of Western tales, from James Franco’s desperado trying to rob a remote prairie bank and Tom Waits’s prospector searching for gold, to Liam Neeson’s showman endeavoring to make a living with an armless-and-legless performer, and Zoe Kazan’s single woman struggling to survive during a wagon-train trip across the plains, the absurd and the mournful constantly converge in unanticipated and striking ways. That’s most true of the dazzling opening discharge, in which Tim Blake Nelson’s crooning gunslinger Buster Scruggs proves a simultaneous homage to, and critique of, the Roy Rogers archetype and, by extension, the myths of the West it helped create.

The chapter starring the title character played by Tim Blake Nelson is a little ridiculous and the Franco-led bank robbery tale is too brisk but soon enough the movie finds its footing. In addition to finding death, cruelty, and despair in the West, the Coen's also find romance in the people and beauty in the landscape. What's the best chapter? Probably "The Gal Who Got Rattled," an achingly moving epic in miniature starring Zoe Kazan as wayward traveler Abigail and Bill Heck as soft-spoken cowboy Billy. In a movie that's not afraid to make you laugh or make you ponder some deep existential questions.