The Coens come out with guns blazing for a brutal & beautiful six shooter of Old West tales.

As directors go, the Coen brothers have always been a bit like filmmaking Marmite. Many love them, some can’t stand them. While the cinephiles amongst us will wax lyrical about the finer points of their output, their appeal with general audiences has been far from plain sailing.

They’ve had hits, sure, yet their unconventional, idiosyncratic style really hasn’t been to everyone’s taste. As someone who has enthusiastically screened personal favourites like The Big Lebowski and Fargo to friends whose opinions I trust, only to receive a dismissive shrug in return, I know this all too well.

However, as much as it pains me to admit it, I can see where they’re coming from. The Coens are a cinematic treasure and personal filmmaking heroes of mine; yet, while their place in cinema folk law is irrefutable, they’re far from immune to criticism.

While the 90s and early 00s saw the directors at the very top of their game, their work since has been rather up and down to say the least. For every No Country for Old Men or True Grit winning plaudits and box office dollars, there’s a Burn After Reading lurking around the corner, ready to take things down a notch or two.

The world in which the Coens and their films reside can be a beautifully odd place, full of the mundane and the bizarre, where death, despair and slapstick coexist in an awkwardly harmonious relationship. Yet it’s precisely these eccentricities that can hold audiences at arm’s length.

In many ways, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the Coen brothers in a nutshell. Equal parts charming, funny, arch, lyrical, whimsical, rambling, frustrating, and uneven; this is about as Coen as Joel and Ethen get.

Set way out in the old west, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs tells a six-part anthology tale of life, love, and death on the American frontier. From melodic sharpshooting cowboys to limbless travelling orators to grizzled prospectors looking for that last big pay day, we travel up and down the wild west, encountering absurd and profound stories of rogues, killers, cheats, and thieves; all searching for meaning and fortune in a lawless land.

With regards to westerns, this isn’t the Coen brothers’ first rodeo. Between True Grit and No Country for Old Men, the Coens know their way around the extremities of the genre, yet this feels like the first time they’ve embraced the western wholeheartedly.

With a cheeky wink and a tip of their Stetson, the filmmaking brothers capture a time and a place perfectly yet filter it all through their own stylised sensibilities, producing something utterly beholden to the western’s traditions, yet completely of their own design. Between the characters, dialogue, themes, and setting; this is a highly personal Coen brothers love letter to one of the oldest and grandest genres in Hollywood.

More than anything, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs feels like the perfect culmination of the Coens’ entire filmography. For better or worse, over the course of half a dozen disparate shorts, we’re given a full rundown of the directors’ entire back catalogue, as we’re introduced to familiar characters, offered patented dialogue, and touch on themes that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the brothers’ work will be acquainted with.

While it was initially intended as a television series, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ condensed anthology format works surprisingly well under the circumstances. As much as a Coen brothers TV show will always be a fascinating prospect, a feature-length production feels just about right, with the film’s bite-sized presentation keeping things short, sweet, and infinitely intriguing; even if its total running time makes it one of their lengthiest efforts to date.

However, as is often the case with an anthology narrative structure, not everything hits the spot. While the Coens’ voice is loud and clear throughout, the wide variety of tone, style, and delivery across the six different stories makes for a somewhat uneven viewing experience, with some segments landing with far greater success than others.

As a whole, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a lilting ode to the romance and danger of the wild west, but while the film hits no particular bum notes, there are certainly a couple of wobbles along the way. In particular, ‘Near Algodones’ feels too light and inconsequential, while the last two chapters – ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’ and ‘The Mortal Remains’ – show promise yet descend into a rather aimless ramble.

Yet, the beauty of anthology storytelling lies in its variety. So, while there’s certainly the odd dip in quality here and there, we’re never too far away from a moment of pure Coen brothers magic.

Of the film’s remaining chapters, ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ is bloody, slapstick fun that sees Tim Blake Nelson have a blast as he playfully toys with the very conventions of the western genre, while ‘All Gold Canyon’ is a wonderfully concentrated one-man show by a gruff and weather-beaten Tom Waits (is there any other kind?).

Yet, nestled at the its heart, ‘Meal Ticket’ is the film’s crowning achievement and by far its biggest emotional punch. As an unlikely duo, Liam Neeson and Harry Melling play their part in a pitch-black and heart-breaking meditation on greed, exploitation, fame, and death that will simultaneously warm your soul while leaving you as cold and baron as its snow-slicked setting.

The spectre of death has been a near constant throughout the Coen brothers’ entire filmmaking career and, true to form, mortality plays a pivotal role here. Like a convicted man standing at the gallows, death looms ominously over the film’s head, arriving unannounced in all manner of weird, wonderful, and frequently horrific ways for its unsuspecting characters.

Following the varying tones of the film’s six chapters, death takes many impressively diverse forms. Sometimes tragic, often darkly comic, these are classic western deaths done the Coen way; where comedy and tragedy are one and the same, and slapstick can be both hilarious and brutal in one foul swoop.

Death of course goes hand-in-hand with the western, which is perhaps why it’s been such an alluring genre for the Coens over the years. From True Grit to No Country for Old Men to Fargo, mortality has been the catalyst and the focus for much of the directors’ career and this preoccupation reaches new heights here with a death overload that’s both shocking and thought-provoking in equal measure.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is the Coen brothers’ in microcosm and, as such, the film’s six distinct parts touch base with almost all the directors’ topical preoccupations through the years. Although death find itself around every corner, the film casts its net wide, picking up on issues of greed, loneliness, the human condition, and violence (among many others), in a true smorgasbord of Coen-isms.

While it does everything you’d expect a Coen brothers movie to do, what truly marks The Ballad of Buster Scruggs out as one of their best is its jaw-dropping appearance. Using digital cameras for the very first time, the Coens - together with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel - utilise the available technology to its absolute fullest, showcasing the wide vistas of Nebraska (‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’), the dusty desolation of New Mexico (‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ and ‘Near Algodones’), and the dual beauty of Colorado’s varying landscape (‘The Meal Ticket’ and ‘All Gold Country’) in all their guts and glory.

Right up there as one of the smartest looking films the directors have every produced, each location is given a unique hue to suit its tone. From chilling blues to idyllic greens to sun-baked yellows, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an absolute treat for the eyes. So, while the consistency of the tales themselves may be lacking, the cinematography and visual storytelling on offer is consistently spectacular.

As a ‘Netflix Original’, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs marks a true breakthrough for the streaming giant and a real feather in their cap. While it’s been slim pickings film-wise for Netflix thus far, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs nevertheless represents a high-water mark in the company’s movie output, with the collaboration between themselves and the Coens feeling like the perfect blend of commercial appeal and experimentalism that’ll hopefully pave the way for a fruitful partnership going forward.

Allowing the Coens the kind of artistic freedom they probably haven’t seen since their early years, Netflix’s hands-off approach unchains the directors and allows them to run wild. Free of commercial constraints and traditional theatrical distribution, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs plays with tone and structure in ways you rarely see in mainstream cinema today; and for such an experimental, unconventional film to be given a platform on the biggest streaming service on the planet, you can’t help but be impressed.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an oddity in a filmography full of oddities. Landing somewhere between True Grit and Hail, Caesar!, its idiosyncratic, off-kilter nature would’ve made it extremely hard for the film to find an audience through tradition distribution means. Netflix picking the film up could well be the best thing to happen to both the service’s film division and the Coens themselves, marking the moment the company cinematically came of age and the second wind the directors sorely needed after several inconsistent years.

Wonderfully odd, masterful, beautiful, and frustratingly inconsistent; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs represents the filmmaking career of the Joel and Ethan Coen in a nutshell. While not all its six disparate stories quite hit their mark, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is nevertheless a lovingly crafted deconstruction of the western and a thought-provoking meditation on death that’s both heart-breaking and hilarious. The Coens returning to the well of the western genre feels like just the right move for their career right now and if this tentative relationship with Netflix is anything to go by, this could be the beginnings of a prosperous future for all involved.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is available to stream on Netflix now.