The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Tim Blake Nelson turns in a Wild West version of "Alan a-Dale" as he plucks his minstrel's guitar and tells us an half-dozen tales of life in the pioneering United States of the late 1800s. His is the first of these stories, and serves to give us a clue as to the quirkiness of what's to follow from these stand-alone observations of a dog-eat-dog society as it emerges from it's civil war. Along the way, there are homages paid to both the plots of films like "Stagecoach" and to just about any of the actors who rode an horse, cracked a whip or slung a rifle. My own personal favourite has to be the ageing prospector (Tom Waits) who armed with his mule, his giant pans and what appears to be the mining equivalent of a divining rod, attempts to find a lucrative seam of gold from a seemingly random stream - and, of course, there are quite a few twists in this tale of perseverance which did make me smile. On that front, there is plenty of humour for us to appreciate here too as Vaudeville meets gambling, banks get robbed and romance gets it's due comeuppance. Though light-hearted, this also manages to remind us of just how brutal and torrid life could be for those setting off into these virgin territories facing the difficulties of terrain, Indians and of the vengeful grudges that survived their recent blue v grey conflict. No expense has been spared on the production design of the film. It's constituent scenarios of the grand cinematography that combines the vast with the intimate - especially as our final story confines itself largely to the interior of the stagecoach; and the episodic nature of these stories provides us with entertaining vignettes without the need for an anchor star.