New York • No location is more central to the iconography of the Western than Monument Valley. Its majestic sandstone buttes, a revolving backdrop for John Ford, have been the setting for countless stagecoach chases and John Wayne passages.
And thanks to the Coen brothers’ “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” this hallowed ground at the Utah-Arizona line is also now home to Tim Blake Nelson, as the all-white-clad “San Saba songbird” Buster Scruggs, strumming his guitar on a horse and singing, with twang and gusto, like a slightly deranged Roy Rogers.
It’s the opening salvo in a six-part anthology film from the Coens that corrals a stampede of Western archetypes and tropes only to invert, distort and deliriously amplify them.