Marvelously granular 'Grit'

In True Grit, Charles Portis reminded his fellow Americans of what was good in the Western. It's worth being reminded again 

The following review was posted recently on the Books page of the History News Network site.

One of the many felicitous consequences of Joel and Ethan Coen's decision to remake the 1969 western True Grit is republication of the original Charles Portis novel. First published in 1968 amid the tumult of an angry era of change, True Grit was was a decidedly old-fashioned book. In the decades since, many writers and filmmakers have felt compelled to "reinvent" the Western, to make avowedly "revisionist" statements that correct the weaknesses and shortcomings of the genre, which in many cases were real enough. But True Grit is a compelling reminder of why it has long been so satisfying, and the pleasures it affords in its most classic iterations.

The story is simple enough. It opens in post-Reconstruction Arkansas, where 14-year old Mattie Ross has come to the city of Fort Smith to claim the body of her father, murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney. But Mattie is not content simply to resolve her father's affairs; she's determined to avenge the crime. So she hires a somewhat unscrupulous Federal Marshall named Rooster Cogburn to retrieve Chaney from Indian Territory because she believes Cogburn has the "grit" for he job. One complication takes the form of another marshal, a Texan named LaBeouf, who also wants Chaney. The two men agree to collaborate, only to encounter another complication: the implacable insistence by Mattie that she join them. And so it that a semi-comic odyssey begins, one in which we get our fair share of horses, guns, bad weather, snakes, and all the requisite elements that are the prerequisites for a successful Western.

Mattie Ross is one of the great creations of modern American literature. As Donna Tartt (herself the distinguished author of 1992 novel The Secret History -- why has that never been made into a movie?) points out in her incisive afterword in this edition of the novel, there's long been a tendency among cult fans of this novel to compare her to Huck Finn. But Mattie is a tougher and smarter kid than Huck was.
She's more solemn than Huck, but Portis is endlessly inventive in exploiting her solemnity for comic effect, even as he evokes the language and attitude of what in many ways is a lost world. Mattie narrates the story from the perspective of about a half-century later, occasionally making contemporary asides like this one:

Thank God for the Harrison narcotics law. Also the Volstead Act. I know Governor Smith is 'wet' but that is because of his race and religion and he is not personally accountable for that. I think his first loyalty to the country and not to 'the infallible Pope of Rome.' I am not afraid of Al Smith for a minute. He is a good Democrat and when he is elected I believe he will do he right thing if he is not bullied into an early grave as was done to Woodrow Wilson, the greatest Presbyterian gentleman of the age.

All the major characters in the novel are Southern, and Confederate in their sympathies. Cogburn was one of Quantrill's Raiders, the notorious outfit responsible for atrocities in the Lawrence Raid of 1863, though he himself seems to be a rogue with a heart of gold. Cogburn's past becomes a topic of heated discussion at one point, but Portis less interested in judging or defending these people than in capturing their attitudes as unselfconsciously as he can. As we see in their occasional interactions with African Americans or Indians, they are neither more or less racist than their contemporaries.

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although it did not happen every day," Mattie says in the opening line of the book. The magic of this novel is the way its compellingly strange language and narrator come to seem palpably real. It is the great achievement of True Grit that it evokes a moment in U.S. history in all its ordinary, extraordinary wonder.

True Western

 

True Grit as a post-revisionist Western

In terms of the frequency of its production, at least, the Golden Age for the film genre of the Western was the 1950s. Ever since, a variety of critics and filmmakers have hailed any number of movies as "revisionist." Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns of the sixties (featuring the emerging Clint Eastwood); Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969); Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970): all were seen, at the time and since, as convention-shattering, even as they repeatedly referenced Western mythology. The genre went into eclipse through the seventies and eighties, exceptions like The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Dances with Wolves (1990) notwithstanding. Eastwood himself kick-started the genre again with Unforgiven (1992), which won the Academy Award Best Picture -- and, of course, was hailed with the same term.

Revisionism is a term that's various and elastic; sometimes it refers to attitudes toward violence, toward Native Americans, or simply toward the narrative conventions of the western itself. Occasionally even "classic" western filmmakers like John Ford are considered their own revisionist, as when Ford followed a paradigmatic Western like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) with the valedictory Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Revisionism has come to mean everything, and thus nothing -- except perhaps a kind of condescension toward the past on the part of those who conflate "new" with "sophisticated" and "old" with "simplistic."

It is in this context that I very happily very happily viewed -- for what I hope will be the first of many screenings -- of Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit last weekend. The Coens, who are among the most productive and satisfying filmmakers now working, nabbed a Best Picture Oscar for their 2007 project No Country for Old Men, a movie which, notwithstanding its 20th century setting, is essentially a western. True Grit, located in Choctaw territory in in the late 1870s, qualifies as a Western by just about any definition.

And it's here I will say flatly that True Grit is a post-revisionist Western. Yes, it is a remake of the 1969 movie starring John Wayne in a role that won him an Oscar on what was largely considered a collective sense of sentiment on the part of Academy members. (Jeff Bridges has the role of Rooster Cogburn this time, and makes it seem wholly his, and wholly effortless, as he always does.) And yes, the protagonist happens to be a fourteen year-old girl (played with really true grit by Hailee Steinfeld in an Oscar worthy performance herself). But there's no obvious effort to subvert, reconfigure, allegorize or anything else here -- except tell a very good story about a daughter trying to avenge the death of her father within the conventions of a genre that includes big landscapes, exciting shootouts, and rough justice administered with minimal government involvement. And lots of horses.

Of course, there are all kinds of nods to modern sensibilities here, ranging from the greater sense of agency on the part of the female character to the wry sense of humor that is the Coens' trademark. But they feel no need to somehow place nuance and beauty outside the boundaries of genre. The good guys, notably Bridges and the Texas Ranger played by Matt Damon, have their limitations. The bad guys (notably Josh Brolin) have partially redeeming values, ranging from a sense of humor to the good sense to recognize a smart, tough girl when confronted by one. And the oddly formal, but compelling language of Charles Portis's 1968 novel is imported to give the movie a distinctive voice. But what True Grit does more than anything else is make a case for the Western as a viable mode of artistic communication in the 21st century. And it succeeds, in gorgeous, parched colors.

Good to know something still works in this country.