If that sounds like a vintage Coen vision, or maybe a vintage Coen joke, it is, but the Coens have always made death into a semi-philosophical jape. In “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” life is nasty, brutish, and short, even for a number of the protagonists the film’s signature motif is people getting killed with one clean shot through the forehead. Not something major, but a theme with a pinch of resonance. More than that, the episodes are linked by a scabrous obsession with death that, in the end, adds up to something. It’s full of majestic wilderness imagery that pops on screen (Monument Valley has rarely looked this otherworldly in its grandeur, and there are green mountain vistas so pristine you want to go back in time and live there). Yet “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” in its gnarly and ambling way, does justify its existence as a movie. The movie runs 135 minutes, and since the episodes are uneven in quality (though the best of them seize and hold you), you may feel, at moments, that it’s too much of a just-okay thing. If you were going to be cynical about it, you might say “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is still a Netflix series - it’s just one that the Coens are forcing you to binge-watch. Its writer-directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, decided instead to jam the episodes - violent, picturesque, cornball mythic tales of the Old West - into one feature-length anthology film. “ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” was originally conceived and shot as a six-episode series for Netflix.
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