Why does the new Coen brothers anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs replicate a collection of short stories? Because it’s a Boomer jest. The film’s format recalls those Edward O’Reilly Pecos Bill tall tales that I used to read in my elementary-school library during recess. The Coens update what’s been called O’Reilly’s “visual farce and verbal exaggeration,” starting with an on-screen image of a hardcover book. Its pages flip to brightly colored plates that introduce each of the six tales — all of them distinguished by the patented sarcasm that made the Coen duo a favorite of Baby Boomers, Gen X’ers and Millennials.
Regrettably, that popular appeal doesn’t make them America’s great filmmaking team — it often depends on nastiness and sophomoric arrogance. Each story here illustrates fake-lore Americana: “Buster Scruggs” (a ballad of violence and comic redemption); “Near Algodones” (about individualism felled by anti-social cynicism); “Meal Ticket” (about theater and literature that are our exploitative cultural heritage); “All Gold Canyon” (sentimentalizing a lonely ol’ prospector’s familiar greed); “The Girl Who Got Rattled” (a pessimistic romance showing the folly of American expansion); and “The Mortal Reward” (in which religious superstition and bigotry reveal a doomed people’s fate).
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