The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - "All the Meanness in the Used-to-Be."

As I reach the end of the Coen filmography (as a duo, and hopefully not the true end), I have started to consider my Coen fandom. Before I started this rewatch, I would have put them up there with my favorite filmmakers of all time, and that’s still the case. But the tail end of things did give me a little doubt, and that’s bullshit. My love of the majority of their filmography put my expectations far too high. So when I see something like Hail, Caesar! and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, I come away liking them and even appreciating how others can find them to be masterpieces, but I’m disappointed that I didn’t love the films.

This is obviously my own problem and no fault of the Coens. With Scruggs specifically, I think my issue was how much I loved True Grit upon this most recent re-watch. That movie just gets better every time I watch it. The first time I watched Scruggs, I don’t think I was expecting another True Grit, but the episodic nature of it threw me, and the Netflix release of it bothered me, as well. I’ve gotten more accepting of streaming releases, but there’s still this ‘90s kid in me that thinks of them as direct-to-video releases that are inherently lesser than theatrical releases.

Ignoring the streaming aspect (though I still think it’s bullshit that this doesn’t have a physical release), the episodic formula made this feel more like a limited series than a movie. I prefer longer stories from the Coens, not vignettes. Of course, all of this depends on how much you like the vignettes.

For the most part, I enjoyed them all. The titular “Scruggs” is my favorite just for the morbid fun (nothing beats the Kurgan shooting himself in the face three times) of it all. And I could watch a whole movie of Tim Blake Nelson singing and murdering his way through the Old West. The James Franco segment is better than just the meme it spawned. I’ll take Stephen Root yelling “Pan shot!” over “First time?” every time. And the Tom Waits prospector segment is simply beautiful. 

While my favorite segments feature plenty of death and misery, I still find them mostly fun. The other three segments bum me out. The wagon train segment is fine, and I appreciate how shitty it presents the reality of the world (and it confirms that Grandma Turner from True Grit is still kicking, or was, if it takes place before). But that ending is a bit of a gut punch. “The Mortal Remains” is my least favorite segment. I just don’t enjoy Sartre-type shit, even though all the acting and dialogue is top-notch. I especially enjoyed Harris from Major League (Chelcie Ross) as a fur trapper even goofier than the dentist with the bear hide from True Grit. 

Those two segments are downers, but nothing compares to “Meal Ticket,” with Liam Neeson and Harry Melling. Nothing in the entire Coen filmography bums me out as much as this segment. It’s to the point that if I ever watch this again, I plan on skipping this part. And that’s my biggest “issue” with the film; it bums me out. It’s just not something I want to return to, whereas films like Llewyn Davis, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, True Grit, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, and The Man Who Wasn’t There create worlds I want to revisit and spend time in, year after year, even if they contain some terrible things, as well. And I truly cannot explain what it is about those movies compared to the others that click with me, but I’ve seen some wildly different rankings of their films all over the internet, so I know I’m not alone. When one person’s bottom film can be another’s favorite, then you know you’re dealing with some of the best filmmakers of all time.