#BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS SONG MOVIE#

Sounds nice (there might even be some grace in it), but it’s hard to take Buster’s eschatology too seriously considering he’s part devil and part angelic rodeo clown. If there weren’t, what are all the songs about? I’ll see y’all there, and we can sing together and shake our heads over all the meanness in the used-to-be.” Buster ends his song with a little speech: “There’s just gotta be a place up ahead where men ain’t low-down and poker’s played fair.

#BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS SONG MOVIE#

No more jingle, jangle / I’ll lay my guns down.Īs the two trade verses, Buster floats up to sky, the cheesy digital effects (this is the first Coen brothers movie not to be shot on film) adding to the hokum. After a beat or two, Buster’s ghostly form-complete with wings and a miniature harp-arises to sing a duet with his killer: “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings,” written by David Rawlings and Gillian Welch. He succeeds before Buster can hum a bar he gets a bullet in the head. Having shot up yet another saloon, Buster is called out into the street by a younger gunslinger (Willie Watson) who wants to make a name for himself. Chigurh flipped a coin to decide who died and who lived Buster swings open a saloon door and lets fate choose who looks up.īuster treats us to three songs in his opening segment, but the most telling is his final one. Like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), the expressionless hit man of the Coens’ equally nihilistic No Country for Old Men, Buster takes a capricious approach to human life. Wearing snappy white chaps and a wide smile, Buster Scruggs looks friendly enough, but within the film’s first few minutes he’s blithely killed about a dozen men (to be fair, they almost all drew first). The first person we meet in the film is the title character, a singing gunslinger-the “San Saba Songbird” is one of his nicknames-played by Tim Blake Nelson. Here and throughout Buster Scruggs, grace is as arbitrary as violence, and as meaningless.

Then the rug-or should I say the hangman’s platform-gets pulled out from under him. In “Near Algodones,” a dim-witted bank robber (James Franco) miraculously cheats death so many times he gets cocky. More often than not, clemency is a comic red herring. (Spoilers ahead.) If notions of mercy were surprisingly prevalent in the Coens’ last film, Hail, Caesar!, they are in short supply here. In each segment, different characters on the American frontier find themselves on a trail toward punishment and death. But what about the hereafter? Is Buster Scruggs equally pessimistic on that front? The movie ranks among the Coen brothers’ more nihilistic efforts in that it doesn’t seem to think the sadistic gunslingers, selfish pioneers, greedy prospectors, and others populating this mythological Old West deserve to live.

Considering all of the dying that takes place in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, an anthology Western from Joel and Ethan Coen, it’s understandable that there’s also a lot of talk about the life to come.

Ballad of buster scruggs song