Netflix's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Coen Brothers laugh at Death in this little classic

By Sreejith Kamalanayanan

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an important movie because it marks the transition of the Coen Brothers to streaming platform. The duo is one of the most important filmmakers working today and the news of their transition to Netflix has made everyone eager and curious.

It's an anthology Western movie with every segment bearing the signature of the Coen Brothers. Coens picked death as the theme for their foray into Netflix and infused in it their unique and bizarre sense of humor.

Almost every central character in each segment have to confront death at a crucial point in the movie. Death pulls curtain on almost all the episodes in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

The first episode is titled The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The central character is a wanted outlaw called Buster Scruggs. He's fearless, but not a stiff, weathered gunslinger that we are familiar with through Western films. 

Related Reading: MCCABE&MRS MILLER: ROBERT ALTMAN'S CLASSIC ANTI-WESTERN FROM THE '70S

Buster Scruggs is a jovial man. He playfully sings songs and playfully kill people without a modicum of guilt. He is very optimistic about killing others without being killed. 

Scruggs enjoys the art of shooting down his victims. He has his own personal style of killing. 

Scruggs has his own personal style of killing

However, the segment ends when someone else challenges him for a gunfight culminating in Scruggs' death.

Coens laugh at Scruggs' death in their typical sense of humor. Scruggs believes that he will be dead by examining the hole in his hat. He was so damn sure he won't get killed in a gunfight. Coens make another joke by showing Scruggs' soul depart his body slowly. 

The soul of Buster Scruggs departs

Tim Blake Nelson embodies Coens' bizarre humor and irony and channels it through Buster Scruggs. He succeeds in it, after all he knows Coens very well. We saw him in a previous Coens epic called 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?'

Coens break the rhythm if the movie in the third segment titled Meal Ticket. A sort of melancholy pervades through this episode. The directing duo invites us to another tragedy but this time they don't ask us to laugh. 

Liam Neeson plays a freak show manager. Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in harry Potter films, plays a young artist named Harrison with no arms and legs. 

Neeson's character travels in a wagon from place to place conducting Harrison's shows.

The show is not turning in a profit and gets worse each passing day as number of viewers shrink. Neeson sees another man conducting a show with a chicken that makes better profits. He buys the chicken and a question arises: What to do with Harrison?

I liked the way how Coens portray the characters' confrontation with death. In the first segment Scruggs look at the hole in hat and he gets a second to reflect on death. 

The bullet hole in Scruggs' hat

In the second segment, James Franco's cowboy is about to be hanged and he sees a pretty young girl. He says "There's a pretty  girl" and dies the next moment. 

In Meal Ticket, death of Harrison is only implied. Neeson's character dips a heavy rock into a river to measure the depth of water.

Harrison sees this while sitting in the wagon. In the next shot Neeson is seen as riding the wagon but Harrison is not there.

Overall The Ballad of Buster Scruggs has an important place in the oeuvre of Coen Brothers. It's not a masterpiece like The Big Lebowsky and Fargo but stands above Intolerable Cruelty,  Burn Fter Reading and even True Grit. I will call it a little classic.

Extra Notes:

There are some moments in the movie that could make for great memes in the coming days. One of them is the bank teller dodging Franco's bullets with pans and yelling "Pan  Shot."

Another one is Franco's reaction to his fellow convict. Both have a noose around their neck and when the other man cries Franco asks "First Time. Huh?". 

This is because Franco had earlier escaped a death sentence at the last moment.

Read another Netflix Review: NETFLIX'S HORROR FLICK 'THE RITUAL' IS CREEPY AND MOODY BUT A ONE-TIME WATCH