The Magnificent Six

The Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a half-dozen mini-Westerns.

- David Edelstein

FOR DECADES, it was easy to undervalue Joel and Ethan Coen—not their droll, hyperliterate dialogue or knowing use of old movie tropes or talent for pinpointing the core eccentricity in a given actor and making it seem hip, even blessed. It was their glibness. Their characters were puppets of a prankster God who dispatched human beings without feeling—a lack of emotion shared by most audiences, who felt little more than admiration for the brothers and maybe for themselves, for getting the in-jokes. This is not to take away from The Big Lebowski, the best stoner comedy of all time, or a handful of other superb entertainments. But the cynicism was distancing.

Nowadays, that cynicism remains intact: On the evidence, the Coens believe that we are ruled by a self-interest that blinds us to the consequences of our actions and that God, if He exists, can be counted on to show no mercy. Gradually, though, macabre farce has yielded to tragedy. Taking their cues from Cormac McCarthy, their modern Western No Country for Old Men spared no one, good or evil, and offered no catharsis. (At the time, this annoyed me—I wanted the conventional consolations of genre. I was shortsighted.) Their next Western, a remake of True Grit, was superficially similar to Henry Hathaway’s version with John Wayne, but the denouement made all the difference. As in Charles Portis’s novel, a girl’s obsession with revenge ends up maiming her (literally and metaphorically) for life: Her universe violently contracts with the shot that kills her father’s murderer. The Coens’ newest Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their bleakest work of all, and one of their richest.