The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Review

An anthology grades badly by definition, because the form guarantees the average gets dragged down by whatever the weakest chapter is. Here the weakest is the traveling show with the armless orator, a grim one-note fable that states its cruelty in the first minute and then holds it for fifteen. The prospector chapter is the opposite, Tom Waits alone in a valley doing arithmetic with a shovel, and it is close to the purest thing the Coens have made. The wagon train story is the real film hiding in here, a full romance and a full tragedy compressed into thirty minutes, and Zoe Kazan is extraordinary in it.

Bruno Delbonnel shoots everything in storybook color that keeps insisting these are illustrations, which lets the violence land as punctuation rather than spectacle. The dialogue is Coen dialogue, formal and archaic and much funnier than it looks on the page. Taken chapter by chapter this is a strong collection. Taken as one sitting of two hours and thirteen minutes it is lumpy, front loaded and tonally incoherent, and the format is the thing holding it back.