TRUE GRIT (Joel and Ethan Coen 2010)

[Chris Knipp]

Joel and Ethan Coen: True Grit (2010)
Review by Chris Knipp

http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/4915/truegrit400jpge63984e06.jpg

The Coens make a drier, dirtier version of the story

"True grit" is the quality 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) has heard is possessed by one-eyed US Marshall Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), and she hires him to go after Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin), the man who has shot and killed her father. But compared to Bridges' seedy, alcoholic marauder, "true grit" seems in a more pristine state in young Mattie herself. Only she can't go and get the killer by herself. She gets help, and some trouble, from both Rooster and the Texas Ranger LaBoef (Matt Damon). This is vintage, if not prime, Coen brothers. It's a good and flavorful remake of the 1969 John Wayne film that goes back and gets closer to the formal, contraction-free lingo and slightly satirical tone of the original Charles Portis novel.

Bridges, Damon, Brolin, and the others deliver flavorful performances. But the movie belongs to newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, whose Mattie has a quicker wit and a sterner tongue than anybody else. Steinfeld is a splendidly self-possessed and articulate young actress. She is the reason for seeing True Grit. This is a good adaptation, one in which the Coens are having fun but not ripping up their source. It is far from having the power of their 2007 filming of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which made a great movie. We already knew True Grit made a good movie; this version isn't so much better, just grittier and drier. The Coen brothers are amazingly consistent performers, distinctive auteurs who write as well as they direct, but judging by the high marks, the critics are giving them perhaps just a little bit too much of a free ride this time. Why weren't they -- or I should say why were they not --this enthusiastic about the far more original A Serious Man? Because they didn't get it. This is easier to get, but it offers lesser rewards. In its violence and drollery and its viewpoint of a precocious girl it is more clearly than the 1968 movie something other than a Western, but it lacks the razzle-dazzle and the literary originality of No Country for Old Men. It has moments of wit, terror, and violence, but it doesn't have suspense or profound meaning.

Or course John Wayne got an Oscar for his performance, or as some would say, for the accomplishment of playing John Wayne while getting a little dirty and falling off a horse. The 1969 Mattie tells Rooster "If I smelled as bad as you do I wouldn't live near people." No such comment needed now. When you look at Bridges' Rooster waking from a night in the saloon, you want to hold your nose. The Coens have upped the flavor, and the stench, and the shock of violence: one or two gunshots make you jump out of your seat. The more ornate language gives the impression people are thinking hard. The story is all about bargaining, particularly Mattie's to get her father's money back and to manipulate Cogburn and LaBoef. LaBoef wants the rogue Cheney for a Texas crime, which offers him a better reward. Cogburn and LaBoef are continually sizing up what Cheney is worth to them and whether the girl is a worthwhile proposition. The girl is continually resizing her estimate of the two men. Cogburn doesn't seem much of a prospect when he gets so drunk on the road that he falls off his horse.

Much of this is the same in both movies. This is not a radical reimagining of the book, rather it follows it closely. Though some speak of this book in the same breath with Huckleberry Finn or Little Big Man, it is less impressive than that, not the radical version of the West you find in E. L. Doctorow's brilliant, terrifying Welcome to Hard Times, another Sixties book made into a western (in 1967, with Henry Fonda and Warren Oates) that might be ripe for a bolder remake. The Coens' version of Portis' book is far less sanitized, but with its handsome Roger Deakins cinematography, it is still standard movie fare in acting and visuals. What recommends this recension, besides Hailee Steinfeld (who is not enough emphasized in the credits or posters, especially considering this story is told from her point of view), is the way the cast are encouraged to mouth the lines with all their formalities intact. It's the way they put some English on Portis' mimicry of stilted 19th-century sentences that the Coens have the most fun here. At its best moments this True Grit shows how shootouts and haggling are different levels of the same thing, the American West's recycling of greed into bravery and profit.

[Johann]

I've seen the VERY impressive trailer a few times now and I'm looking forward to True Grit.

The Coens are Masters, but I have to say that I didn't like A Serious Man- I saw it on DVD and shut it off after 20 minutes.
Just not my kind of movie. Same with No Country For Old Men- some mighty scenes in it, but what was the point? FRIENDO?
(BTW, Javier Bardem was on Leno last night- lovely man he is)

For me, The Big Lebowski can't be equalled. That is their Absolute Masterpiece. (my opinion only- all you Fargo fans can simmer down). They captured something really really special with Lebowski. The cult status is off the charts, the humour in it is off the charts and I'm just happy beyond belief that it even exists. I could say the same about Blood Simple, a movie that I would die to have as my First.

Those Coen brothers have got the power.
Just the 30 second trailer for True Grit pumped me up.
It's hard to get me jacked up for a remake (even of a John Wayne classic), but I know great moviemaking when I see it, and that trailer revealed enough Moxie to get me excited about trekking to a theatre for it.

[Johann]

Chris, the trailer gets me excited because it indeed feels like "Prime" Coen brothers (thanks)- the kind of mighty cinema that I know they can deliver.
Burn After Reading seems like a waste of time. Someone has yet to convince me that it's well worth watching over and over.
What are the rewards of A Serious Man?
Should I have shut it off after 20 minutes? What revelations did I deny myself?
I do not question the Coens' skill as filmmakers. Not one bit. They just have it, Man.
I just wonder how they choose their projects...

The photo you've added to your review is excellent. Hailee looks great, and so does Mr. Bridges.
Is that line from the original in this one? "They say you are a man with True Grit.."?
I hope so. That's the line I remember.

It seems like the Coens have pulled off an amazing remake, with an amazing cast.
Can't wait to check it out.

[Chris Knipp]

I am not the huge fan of THE BIG LEBOWSKI others are, but it's got great stuff in it (Goodman, always brilliant in their films). Only a few Coen brothers films seem like flops. I also do not like OH BROTHER, WHERE ARE THOU. It's demeaning to simple country folk. BURN AFTER READING is not worth your time. TRUE GRIT is a good film, but it is one of their most conventional. Many didn't get A SERIOUS MAN. Read my review of it: http://www.cinescene.com/knipp/serious.htm. Or Armond White's: http://www.nypress.com/article-20412-the-humor-in-gloom.html. His review of TRUE GRIT is good too. He rearranges the Coen canon. A SIMPLE MAN? It's about Jewishness. Yet both non Jews and Jews have seriously misread the film. It belies the popular notion that they're cold, cruel ironists and explains why they get that label. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, as I've said repeatedly, is simply an accurate adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel. Their viewpoint however is less bleak than this great contemporary American novelist's.

The trailer for TRUE GRIT is very well done. But these things are very misleading. The dialogue is spliced back and forth and scenes are chopped to make them different from these sequences in the film itself. The effect is very snappy. But it's not a cross section of the actual scenes so much as a collage with sound and image re-matched. I'm not saying you won't like the movie, just that the trailer is different.

Johann, I thought you said you weren't seeing any movies. What were you doing watching this trailer? Or did you see it not in a cinema but on the box?

[Chris Knipp]

Armond White mentions THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE and THE LADYKILLERS. White has enlightening insights very often but his views are also different from mine. Those are two other Coen films you can do without. The first is forgettable and the second is a travesty. I hated THE LADYKILLERS and tore into it in a review: http://www.cinescene.com/reviews/ladykillers.htm. You have to take the Coens case-by-case. They are prolific. Their energy never flags, but their inspiration does.

[Johann]

Yep, I saw it on the box.
Thanks for the tips about the scenes in the trailer not matching up.
Trailers are meant to grab you, and they grabbed me with the True Grit.
The poster is really cool too- saloon-like, wanted-poster type.

No movies for me until Jan. I'll be checking out Tron for sure, another Jeff Bridges movie.
Thanks for the armond white link!

And you might wanna edit the date (210) on your review.

[Chris Knipp]

I think the poster font follows those used for the earlier TRUE GRIT movie. Classic 19th-century style of course, or so we think.

I too noticed Jeff is in both movies. Quite a spread.

I'll check the typo in the date.

[Johann]

THE DUDE is unstoppable!

[Chris Knipp]

From Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker online, these interesting views about the Coens and TRHE GRIT. This appealed to me because of his appreciation of the too often unappreciated masterpiece, A SERIOUS MAN. He is listing his favorite things of 2010, some of which for him personally happened to be things that are from 2009, that he got to a year later:


Movie: Joel and Ethan Coen’s “A Serious Man” also came out in 2009, but I saw and loved it in 2010, on DVD. I don’t think I know anybody who would dispute the greatness of the Coen brothers, but opinions differ on which of their movies are insanely great and which are not so great. I put “A Serious Man,” a hiliarious and appalling Minnesota mashup of the Book of Job and the books of Roth, in the former category, along with, in ascending order of insane greatness, “Barton Fink,” “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Big Lebowski,” and “Fargo.” The Coens’ signature ultra-violence, deployed to such brilliant effect in “Fargo,” is a little too nihilistic for my taste in some of the others—e.g., “Blood Simple” and “No Country for Old Men.” There’s a middle category, too. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” has the usual brilliant cast and striking visual qualities, not to mention some great set pieces and a score worth owning the CD of, but it’s marred, in my book, by the conceit that race was not a problem in Mississippi in the nineteen-thirties. The current Coen release, “True Grit,” is also a middler. The very promising first half, in which the characters are introduced and their ornate conversational style explored, yields to a fairly conventional set of chases and shoot-’em-ups. To be fair, though, what’s middling for the Coens would be unattainably fine for most of the rest of Hollywood.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/12/top-five-liberal-political-triumphs-of-2010.html#ixzz19MuEdoBq

[Howard Schumann]

TRUE GRIT

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, U.S., (2010), 110 minutes

Our contemporary society, debased by greed and corruption, destruction and rape of the environment, and an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, longs for a reminder of the good old days in the West when men were men, ready at the drop of a hat to draw their guns and shoot each other in the middle of dusty streets. The only problem is that it wasn’t true. According to writer Earl Hunsinger, “The true story of the Old West is boring. Many western towns had strict gun ordinances, making it illegal to carry guns in town. People entering the town were required to surrender their firearms to the sheriff.” Although there was some violence, it has been blown out of proportion and is much less than we see today. In the latest paean to the Old West mythology, The Coen Brothers have remade True Grit, the John Wayne vehicle from 1969 that earned him his only Oscar for Best Actor.

Based on the novel by Charles Portis, True Grit is more even handed and adult than most Hollywood Westerns and there is not that much of a gap between the good guys and the bad, though apparently fourteen-year-old girls are larger than life. Narrated by the adult Mattie Ross who reflects on the time when she was fourteen, Mattie (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) is self-confident and mature beyond her years as she seeks revenge for the murder of her father at the hands of his employee Tom Chaney. Chaney has gone free to join a band of outlaws in Indian country and she intends to exact revenge. Mattie has come to the village to bury her father and to find a lawman to help her track down Chaney. She chooses the surly, drunken, one-eyed federal Marshall Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn played by Jeff Bridges.

He is the one, with his past history of violence, that she thinks has “true grit” and pursues him until he agrees (for a price) to find and kill Chaney (Jeff Brolin) or capture him for a trial and public hanging. With God and Cogburn on her side (the song “Leaning on the Everlasting Arm” is played repeatedly during the film), Mattie is on a mission and will not stop until she can see Chaney brought to what passes for justice on the frontier. She must first prove how tough minded she is and does so in negotiation with a horse trader (Dakin Matthews). Of course, she comes out on top, managing to get what she wants after making a deal for her father’s worthless ponies.

Before she can convince Cogburn to take her job offer, however, she has to fend off a Texas Ranger named La Boeuf played by Matt Damon, who also wants a piece of Chaney’s hide and has been tracking him to take him back to Texas where he is wanted for killing a State Senator. Though neither Rooster nor LaBoeuf want any interference with their pursuit, she follows them to Indian country, where there are no Indians to be seen since they most likely were run off their land by our God-given right to trample native populations (not discussed in the film). However, Cogburn and LaBoeuf stand amazed as she drives her horse across a river through sheer will power. The young girl soon gets an education that she doesn’t want as they come across a dead man strung up on a tree and she witnesses Cogburn murder a man at close range after he chopped off a boy’s fingers to prevent him from telling the marshal about Chaney’s whereabouts.

As the two zero in on the villain Chaney, they must confront Lucky Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper) and the struggle takes on an epic fight for survival. Though True Grit is filled with the usual violence (what would the story of the West be without it?), the relationship between Rooster and Mattie becomes one of tenderness and caring. Hailee Steinfeld, in her premier role, is simply wonderful as the steadfast, verbally acute teenager who knows how to stand up for herself in a world of men. Jeff Bridges also turns in a convincing performance, although we have to sacrifice understanding three quarters of what he has to say. Regardless of its auditory problems, True Grit is a strong and heartening film that is more straightforward and less quirky than most of the Coen Brothers’ films, making us eagerly anticipate what they have up their sleeve next.

GRADE: B+

[oscar jubis]

True Grit (1969 and 2010)

When I was in elementary school, I was already an avid movie watcher. I loved going to the movies even more that reading or playing futbol with my friends. I loved all kinds of movies, except westerns. I used to figure that I was too impressed with my modern, city-boy ways to relate to the period and setting of the western. In college, I watched The Searchers and discovered Ford, and Hawks, and Anthony Mann. I realized then that my prejudice against the genre was based on early exposure to inferior members: Spaghetti westerns, and films like True Grit (1969).

These films do have redeeming features that make them enjoyable to watch: isolated moments, cheap thrills and fleeting pleasures. Encountering True Grit (1969) again, after a 40 year separation, I realize that it mostly succeeds on its own terms because its ambitions are low. The premise that Mattie, a girl barely into her teens, becomes accepted as part of a posse by two lawmen hired to bring her dad’s killer to justice is intriguing. However, the film, and perhaps also the book by Charles Portis on which it is based, explores this promising scenario only superficially.

The film does not seem to have a perspective on the inherent issues of killing and murder, crime and punishment, justice and revenge. True Grit takes pains avoiding moral issues by, for instance, obliterating the need to decide between killing or merely capturing Tom Chaney, the murderer. Moreover, the drama is underwhelming because the characters have fixed identities. One would expect Mattie’s journey to be a coming-of-age but Mattie has already arrived at a precocious adulthood when we meet her. The opening scene makes it clear that Mattie is her father’s wise advisor and a skillful manager of his estate. True Grit (2010), a remake written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, skips this curtain-raiser and the subsequent murder. A good omen, I thought to myself. My hopes were raised further by the sight of Hailee Steinfeld who was 13 years old when the remake was shot and looks it. I had wondered whether part of the problem with the original was the casting of 21 year-old actress, Kim Darby, as Mattie. Ultimately, it turned out to be of minimal importance.

Those familiar with the source novel seem to agree that the Coens’ version is more faithful to it (not that fidelity to source text is a virtue in itself). It is a grittier, bloodier film, one which, unlike the original, retains the ornate forms of speech presumably spoken in America in the late 19th century. The remake shows the Native Americans who were expunged from the original, mostly as victims of slight or abuse. It is 20 minutes shorter without suffering appreciative losses. And yet, it is not fundamentally a better film that its antecedent. The limitations of the original continue to apply. The problem remains that True Grit is mostly interested in plot and atmosphere. The chase and the respect that grows between Rooster, LaBoeuf, and Mattie are insufficient sustenance. The film has much too little on its mind; not much to say; skin-deep. And by the end of the tale, the characters are basically who they were at the beginning, to the detriment of the film.

[Chris Knipp]

I totally agree with you. The Coens' TRUE GRIT has too little on its mind. Their adaptations seem to be very faithful, though their remakes can be travesties (LAVENDER HILL MOB). NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN was a deadly accurate recreation of Cormac Mc Carthy's novel which is not one of his best, one of his simplest (and hence most adaptable). Is TRUE GRIT in any of its forms a real Western? I would leave that issue to you. I have not pursued this genre, having begun not liking it as you did, Oscar but not being the ardent student of film history that you are. I know some who have and do admire and see classic Westerns all the time. As for the book, my impression was that was not as interesting as some people seem to think. It too is focused on story and atmosphere and has little on its mind I commented that above and referred to E.L. Doctorow's stunning book WELCOME TO HARD TIMES. i might also point to Jarmusch's DEAD MAN as a reference to Westerns that redefines and explodes the genre and has a brilliant sense of period authenticity while still being comical and fantastic. It may indeed be possible to do a lot of valid tsk-tsking over the evisceration of moral distinctions comparing TRUE GRIT, Sr. with TRUE GRIT II. However my impression of the John Wayne version was of something rather lightweight, whether it succeeds or not. I think we kind of agree on that too.

This is a polished product by the Coens but one of their least interesting recent efforts. Even BURN AFTER READING, which turned off most people, at least has sharp contemporary relevance. One of the hidden weaknesses is the casting. The young girl may be good but people fail to recognize that Jeff Bridges is just coasting, as he often is. As for Matt Damon I think it was Rex Reed who said he was "woefully miscast," and indeed it is one of his lamest performances. He can be excellent in certain roles, but in something like this he seems like he's acting in a high school play. The Coens seem like Woody Allen. They just have to keep cranking them out, whether there is inspiration or not. And thie time there wasn't. So their work has ups and downs. People disagree on which are which. But all agree some of their efforts are cool and some are yeeh.

[oscar jubis]

I agree with you, Chris. By all appearances, the book is unremarkable. And I'm sure the Doctorow book is a must-read for fans of the genre. Also, Dead Man is a film I highly admire. I think that the problem with True Grit is not with any of the actors but with the roles they are asked to play. Both films are "lightweight", in my opinion. Both films have done well at the box-office because they are well-made and entertaining. They achieve their unlofty goals.

[Chris Knipp]

We are agreed on that too. I did not mean to attack Matt Damon. It's not the actors, but the casting, which is more or less what you are saying too. "The roles they are asked to play." Bridges is put in a role that leads him to coast, and Damon is cast in a role that makes him look lame.

[oscar jubis]

I am still with you on this one. You make sense. By the way, watch Ms. Steinfeld win an undeserved Oscar for her performance of a role that is too undemanding to merit mention.

[Chris Knipp]

Let's not get too excited about the Oscars, Oscar.