THE PARAGON OF ANIMALS
LEAVE IT TO THE COEN BROTHERS TO MAKE AN ANTHOLOGY film brimming with colorful characters, unexpected turnabouts, engrossing scrapes and dilemmas, picturesque vistas, and symmetric structural and visual pleasures in which the territory of mankind amounts to little more than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a film made up almost exclusively of anti-heroes—not to be confused with antiheroes, commonly used to describe protagonists like Travis Bickle or William Munny, whose often vile actions do little to expunge their fascination or their ability to ably carry a narrative. Joel and Ethan Coen’s gallery of reprobates here are quite the opposite of what we would traditionally refer to as a hero: feckless, loveless, aimless, murderous, weak-willed, greedy, or pathetic, and it’s unlikely that any of them could have sustained a feature-length narrative without delivering viewers directly to the exits. But what makes the Coens’ gambit work so brilliantly is that these discrete tales of the banal and the cursed accumulate into a single, unified work that is much stronger, stranger, and sadder than initially seems possible. These six stories are set in a broad, baldly fictional Old West, and taken together they reflect a kind of inverse American progress, an ever-growing moral deficiency that rides sidesaddle with the historical realities of western expansion, and which, however its defiantly off-trend filmmakers might deny it, speaks succinctly to the spiritual waywardness of our current moment.
The Minnesota-born brothers, whose peripatetic brand of filmmaking has brought them to various regions of the U.S.—real and imaginary—for the past 30-plus years, (1987) (2007) and (2010). Of these, the latter—from the Charles Portis book also adapted into the 1969 film that earned John Wayne his Oscar—is their most rigorous engagement with the devices and story beats of the Western; it’s also the most visually restrained, emotionally earnest film of their career, thus making it as temperamentally different from as anything they’ve ever made.
