The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ new film, reveals the impact of digital technology and tells six Western stories
I watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ latest film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was recently released on Netflix. The film is excellent, hardly a great surprise when it comes to Joel and Ethan Coen.
What is new is that the film was produced by Netflix and marks the Coens’ entry into digital imagery, in some ways geared toward the small screen—whether on a computer, tablet, phone, or living-room television.
Aesthetically, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs repeats some hallmarks of the Coen brothers’ mastery, such as impeccable cinematography and sweeping landscape shots. Yet the film’s palette makes the digital presence explicit through its artificial coloring, shifting between shades of yellow, blue, and green.
This recurs in the six independent stories comprising the screenplay, which won that category at the Venice Film Festival. There was speculation that the film would become a series when transferred to Netflix, but this did not happen. Nevertheless, its format of self-contained stories favors viewers accustomed to series.
No Country for Old Men
All the stories take place in the American West and are thoroughly sordid, though seasoned with the duo’s unfailing morbid humor. This humor flirts, in a way, with New York Jewish humor of Ashkenazi, that is, European origin, with its penchant for self-irony that underpins the Coens’ brand of black humor.
Fans of the brothers, as I am, will once again encounter their filmography’s confrontation with the cultural DNA of the United States through the lens of an imagined Western. A land without law or owner, with “no place for the weak”—or No Country for Old Men.
The cast is stellar: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, musician Tom Waits… and it is essentially male. That is another of the film’s strengths: the way it explores a tremendously macho world verging on the pathetic.
So the missing presence was Frances McDormand, star of several of the brothers’ films and Joel Coen’s wife. Otherwise, those distinctive credits remain: directed by Ethan and Joel Coen; written by Joel and Ethan Coen; edited by Roderick Jaynes, the Coen brothers’ pseudonym.
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