“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs compels viewers to examine the oeuvre of Joel and Ethan Coen from a new angle. Cinema’s pair of existentialist tricksters have always brought a certain sadness to their work: the bittersweet melancholy of The Big Lebowski’s final moments; Marge Gunderson’s bafflement at Fargo’s bloodshed; the injured existentialism of Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. But through these six stories set in the American West, their filmography gets its saddest, most tragic entry yet, an elegiac contemplation of death in a world that may or may not be indifferent to our suffering.
“Consisting of six short stories set in the American West, each with a beautifully distinct aesthetic and tone, the anthology format allows the Coens to thread together a dazzling range of their stylistic and thematic elements; profound ironies, absurdist wit, unanswered philosophical inquiries, sudden and catastrophic violence, a sense of humor and style that blurs the line between earnest and cynical.
“In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, death doesn’t just hang in the air, it’s something so close it takes on a tactile quality. It’s so inevitable that even the one victory the film allows isn’t so much because the character won his prize, but because he skirted death (for now). We’re all sharing a stagecoach ride to the end, and we all have a story about how we got there. Exploring this truth through the eyes of Buster Scruggs’ eclectic characters, the Coen Brothers present something that’s as thrilling, resonant, and meaningful as anything they’ve ever done.” ~ James Frazier
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