'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs': The Coens go 3 for 3 with westerns

Nothing in the Coen Brothers' early work would suggest that they were necessarily culturally or temperamentally suited to revitalize the western genre, but they have repeatedly demonstrated that they can both elevate and revere this type of film, which has been largely out of fashion for years.

Recently, there have been Tarantino's forays into westerns, but his films are more clearly homages (to spaghetti westerns primarily) than totally original visions. In No Country for Old Men, True Grit, and now The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coens have made strong standalone visions of their own, violent and poignant in equal measure.

The difference is that No Country and True Grit were both adaptations, albeit flawless ones, of very popular source material. Buster Scruggs feels more personal, more like them. It's six stories in one -- all beautifully shot and expertly crafted -- with quirky casting and some of the other hallmarks of the Coen's oeuvre, but their jarring tonal shifts and ambiguous nature make this feel like an interesting new chapter in the Coens' history.

What's curious about the movie is it was released on Netflix, and this may be the rare film that works in that format. It's both episodic and sprawling, with a relaxed, lived in pacing that works for home viewing but might feel tedious in a theater. The film is never boring but it can be a little impenetrable at times, which of course, is also a hallmark of a lot of Coen movies.

The first chapter, from which the film gets its name, is a jarring black comedy -- featuring Tim Blake Nelson as a goofy, singing cowboy on the outside, but a brutal, sadistic sociopath on the inside. The violence is genuinely shocking and surreal in this first piece, but the film feels like the kind of ironic fable that the Coens have tackled in the past.

Part two is also more fun than fierce, with James Franco as a bank robber who's execution keeps getting unexpectedly postponed. It's in the third chapter where things start to get more mercurial and solemn. That story features Liam Neeson as a grizzled manager of a limbless performer. My favorite might be part four, which features a wonderful Tom Waits as a prospector who's just struck gold.

Part five has a great turn from The Big Sick's Zoe Kazan, and a brutally bleak ending. And the strangest of all is the final sequence, which I don't know if I fully understand but still has an intriguing resonance about it.

This is a lot of movie, and it's incredible that the Coens elicit as much affection for its characters as they do considering the fact that the film runs a little over two hours and tells six different stories (each introduced as if it were a section of a book).

I'm still processing the movie, but I think it's heartening that the Coens are still marching to their own drum making unique, idiosyncratic projects like these that reflect their sensibility. I was disappointed that their last big screen effort -- Hail Caesar! -- flopped. It was a pleasurable tribute to old Hollywood.

This film, a tribute to the western -- is anything but old fashioned -- but it does represent a kind of precise storytelling and cultural specificity that is in short supply these days (perhaps only Wes Anderson has a similarly front and center cinematic voice). It's definitely worth a look -- I found that it sticks with you in ways you wouldn't expect.