True Grit

Sadly I am one of the very few movie fans that never got around to seeing the John Wayne movie. But I will now remedy that, it will be in my BD player soon. (Edit: I saw it and to me the 1969 original is a better movie, mostly for John Wayne and, although not authentic, the scenes in the Rocky mountains.)

The Coen brothers are unique in that each of their movies seems to take a different look and a different tone. Two of my favorites are "Fargo" and "The Man Who Wasn't There." Now I will add this one to my list.

Arguably the focus of this movie is young Hailee Steinfeld, 13 during filming, as 14-yr-old Mattie Ross. It is 1878 and lawlessness still pervades the west, as defined by Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. Mattie's dad is shot and killed by an outlaw, who also stole his horse and two California gold pieces.

Mattie is an unusual 14-yr-old, not one for "girlie" pursuits, and with an unusually high intellect, seemingly an expert in law, she takes off for the nearest town to find and hire a US Marshall who will bring the outlaw to justice.

There she encounters an unwilling Jeff Bridges as drunkard Rooster Cogburn, who has the reputation for killing the outlaws to avoid the trouble of bringing them in. But Mattie's promise of $100, a fortune back then, gets Rooster on board. She was told that he has "true grit" and that is the title reference.

Other main characters are Matt Damon as Texas Marshall LaBoeuf, who joins in the search in Arkansas. And the outlaw they seek is Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney, who has joined a gang led by Barry Pepper as Lucky Ned Pepper.

I can't praise the casting enough, every one is ideal for their roles, and young Hailee is superb, worthy of the Oscar nomination. The script and cinematography are also superb. Overall a very enjoyable movie.

The Coen brothers are known for being one of the best filmmakers of our time. They both compliment each other perfectly. When I heard they were remaking the 1969, John Wayne classic True Grit, I was extremely excited and had incredibly high expectations of the film. Being a major fan of Western movies, I was really interested how it would turn out. I wanted the movie to be more faithful to it's original source material, Charles Portis novel, than the 1969 film had been. I was also hopeful that Jeff Bridges would fill the huge shoes of the classic, legendary John Wayne. I was hoping that they would blend the humor of the original 1969 film with some of the suspense or thrills from earlier Coen brothers films like No Country For Old Men or Fargo. But not become way too violent that it causes to stay completely unrecognizable to Charles Portis classic novel.

After seeing the Coen brothers new film, I have to say. My extremely high expectations were surpassed. The movie actually surprised all the hype I had, what an incredible film. The atmosphere, clothing, and the buildings reminded me of the old classic Hollywood westerns they used to make. I had a feeling of nostalgia watching the movie through the end. I felt transported to another time period of the old western. Hailee Steinfeld was amazing in the movie, I truly believe that this is her breakout performance. Matt Damon and Josh Brolin were as usual amazing. But the true star of the film has to be Jeff Bridges, in all respects ( I don't mean to offend John Wayne or anything), I think Jeff Bridges did a better job than John Wayne in portraying Rooster Cogburn. His performance showed much more experience, strength and power, the performance was pretty much unforgettable. Jeff Bridges handily reinvents the iconic role of Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' back-to-the-book-remake. I congratulate the Coen for bringing back the western genre, that Hollywood has ignored so much the last decade or so. I can't stress enough how much I recommend this movie to people.

The least "Coen" of all of the Coens films is also one of their finest. It has a few Coen inflections to it (Damon's twang of a voice, a few random mustached characters crossing paths with our heroes) but for the most part it's a lot more straight forward and less humored. Surprisingly this doesn't detract from the film at all, which is a riveting character journey in classic old school Hollywood fashion. And while generally "old school Hollywood fashion" would be something I would cringe and run away from, the Coens make it enjoyable, emotional and breathtaking. The technical qualities are all astounding; fantastic costumes, a beautiful score and some of the most exquisite cinematography I have ever seen, courtesy of the always reliable Roger Deakins. It's such an entertaining film, with some emotional power that resonates afterwards. There's a lot of twists that I didn't see it taking and none of the characters ended up being what I initially expected them to be. There's a real lack of obvious arcs for these people and that was a nice surprise. The Coens do what they can to avoid Hollywood conventions in what is, at it's core, a very Hollywood film.

Above all else, the film is a character piece and what a wonderful one it is. Unsurprisingly, these people are written very intelligently, given lots of depth and room to grow and surprise. There's a constant battle over what grit truly means and over the course of the film the balance shifts back and forth over which of the three has the truest grit. From the very opening, we see that Mattie Ross has a whole mess of it, this headstrong girl who won't back down to anyone, despite her small stature. Hailee Steinfeld is remarkable here, an actor with talent well beyond her years. She's entirely convincing, taking a character that could have been this annoying little brat and making her simultaneously strong, whip smart, endearing and adorable. I enjoyed watching her in every second. Jeff Bridges was different than I had expected, but I love his arc throughout the film. Maddie goes to him because she believes he has the most grit of all and that he is the right choice for her, but as the journey goes on she doubts her decision and Rooster Cogburn plays with our perception of him quite a few times. Bridges was my least favorite of the three, performance-wise, but that's not a huge slant given how highly I thought of the other two. Matt Damon gets arguably the most interesting role, a character who is detestable when we first meet him and then has the large task of making us realize that he just may have the truest grit of all. LaBoeuf is a silly man who thinks too highly of himself, but as the film progresses it becomes very hard not to care for him. He's a good man at his heart, as are Maddie and Rooster, and it makes it easy to root for all three of them to come out of this alright.

This is a film that I enjoyed even more than I thought I would, a Coen film in the most un-Coen of ways (which was a nice change of pace given that their previous effort, A Serious Man, is probably the most Coen film out there). I enjoyed living with these characters very much and wish that there had been more time to just be with them on their journey. The final confrontation with the men they are hunting is turns suspenseful, surprising and a little too short-lived. I didn't much care for the epilogue, but with the wildly entertaining journey that came before it, I can't fault the film that strongly for it. It's a real cinematic piece, surprisingly Hollywood for the Coens, but it doesn't fall into a lot of the traps that it could have. In fact, it does the opposite, jumping into holes where it could become clichéd and sentimental and then digging it's way out, surprising at every turn. I like that the story doesn't quite end after the basic plot is resolved, because it's not about hunting down the man that killed Maddie's father and hoping to bring him to justice. It's about so much more. It's about these characters and finding out who they really are when it all comes down to it.

Few directors working today in America have mastered form like the Coens, I discover this with every new film they make. True Grit is a commercial film made to please but I don't see a compromise in the making and it's still a distinctly Coen film if you pay notice. Try to take out the Coen character from the film and the film breaks apart, it's that tightly woven in the fabric of it.

A Coen film works for me in the face of it, but I'm always on the lookout for what goes on behind, for the unseen cogs that grind out the fates of their characters. As with No Country, I came to this film looking to see is there a statement on violence, does it happen in a certain way and is the universe indifferent to it, is life worth a damn?

This one here works very much like the Henry Hathaway film from '69, except everyone's better, where John Wayne played a character, Jeff Bridges plays a man, and even Barry Pepper betters my beloved Robert Duvall's turn as Ned Pepper. This probably won't do it for Jeff Bridges because we've been accustomed to expect a certain degree of po-faced seriousness from a great performance (he snarled and staggered in Crazy Heart but he was serious about it), but he's one of the great actors of our times and I find this again in his Rooster Cogburn. Clint Eastwood also fell from a horse in Unforgiven and couldn't shoot a tin can to save his soul, but Munny "was" a scumbag, Cogburn still is and I like that. I like the courtroom scene where it's gradually revealed that he won't only bushwack those he needs to bring to justice, he will lie to make himself out to be the hero.

Another interesting aspect here is how the concept of the gunslinger and the western with it has evolved. When John Wayne played Cogburn in the Hathaway film the reward for the audience was the smirk of watching John Wayne be that drunken failure. The casting mattered in our appreciation. In the remake, most comments seem to point out that it's a fairly traditional/entertaining western. The dastardly revisit of something that was revisionist in the 70's oddly seems to give, in our day, a traditional western. We've been accustomed to heroes who are not heroes, and maybe the erosion of that heroic archetype says something about the way we view the world now, as opposed to 30-40 years ago. Then we were beginning to realize that wars are not gloriously, justly won but survived and endured, now we know there is no clear struggle between dual opposites and have grown disenchanted as that knowledge has failed to prevent the same wars. Now we know there is stuff about the legends that don't make the print, or we are suspicious enough about legends to imagine them.

Is this a traditional western then? Watching True Grit through the eyes of the brass 14yo girl reminded me of Winter's Bone, another film from the same year. In both cases a young girl is determined to plunge herself in a dark world of hurt and walk a path fraught with perils on all sides to achieve a moral purpose, both films maintain an appearance of realism, but what I get from them is a magical fantasy. This becomes more apparent when Mattie falls in the snakepit, but what about the hanged men who are really hanged high? The Hathaway film, ostensibly based on the same material, missed that note and played out a straight western. The Coen film unfolds as a hazy dream of that West. Although I wished for more open landscapes, it makes sense then that film narrows our gaze and clouds the margins. Perhaps we are even seeing the film as Mattie relives the experience in her old age, an affair shaped by memory and time.

This is the marvellous touch effected by the Coens on the material; the minute recreation of the Old West as a historical place and the odd, incongruous moments found within it annihilate any authority over the material.

The epilogue is important in that aspect.

It's not only that Mattie's revenge didn't accomplish anything, that it was for her merely another practical inconvenience to be bargained, paid for, and settled, like her father's ponies and saddle or the service of the US Marshall before, but that she clings to the memory of it so fiercely. What's horrifying then is not so much the violence of the West but the idealization of that violence. The film closes in a time around the turn of the century, people like Cogburn roosted in Wild West shows for a cheering audience, and Mattie is one of the people who lived to tell the tales. Out of those tales, the western of John Ford and Raoul Walsh emerged to print the legend. In a roundabout fantastic way, the Coens give us the true account, the creation myth behind the western.

If there's something to be said for classicism, it's certainly proved in Joel and Ethan Coen's 2010 Western drama True Grit. The adventure begins in 19th century Arkansas, where 14 year old tough-as- nails cowgirl Maddie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) sets out to avenge her father's murder at the hands of outlaw Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). With the most relentless local bounty hunter by her side in Reuben J. Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), she is determined to bring justice to her cause. Complications arise when the pair cross paths with the hotshot LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), a Texas Ranger who is confidently taking aim at the same man. After a series of alliances and realignments Maddie finds herself face-to-face with Chaney; her quivery hand clutching a silver pistol and her mind wrestling with the most important decision yet.

True Grit is a more than worthy successor to it's 1969 predecessor, as the Coen Brothers have followed more strictly the original 1968 novel by Charles Portis. The retention of the female narrator gives the plot an intimate personal aspect, encouraging the audience to root for Maddie throughout her adventure.

Hailee Steinfeld is a surprisingly mature newcomer to the screen, holding her own next to the incomparable talents of Bridges and Damon. With cowboys, outlaws, gun fights and plenty of hard boiled dialogue, True Grit is a classically made conventional western, whose brilliantly raw cinematography transports the audience to the dusty plains of the old west; a land of revenge, passion and grit.