Wednesday I performed a selfless sacrifice for TAS
readers. I went to a theater and watched the Coen brother’s wildly
superfluous True Grit, a much less entertaining business
than the justly acclaimed John Wayne original. I saw it so
red-blooded TAS readers don’t have to.
Yes, that’s Joel and Ethan Coen, the movie making
burn-outs famous for what the entertainment press insists on
referring to as “quirky dark comedies,” and which I’ve called a few
other things. See Raising Arizona, The Big
Lebowski, and Fargo,” certainly one of the most
hideous abuses of celluloid in movie history.
Learning that the Coen brothers had decided to produce
their version and vision of True Grit was no more
disorienting to me than if I had learned that Oliver Stone had
planned to remake Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
True Grit didn’t need to be re-made.
The 1969 horse opera starring John Wayne as U.S. Marshall Rooster
Cogburn is a jewel of a picture, at least a four on a five-point
scale. It fetched the Duke’s only Academy Award of his long and
successful career where he was loved by movie-goers world-wide,
though largely sniffed at by reviewers who disdained his
conservative politics. But assuming the world has room for yet
another True Grit, the Coen boys would be about the last
movie makers I would choose for the job.
The Coen Grit turns out less bad than survivors
of Arizona or Fargo would have every right to
expect. But it’s impossible to make the case the movie is worth two
hours of anyone’s life, particularly in this blessed
season.
The sneering contempt for everyone who isn’t a bi-coastal
film major, which viewers were bludgeoned with in Fargo,
is absent. But much of Fargo’s violence and blood splatter
is present. The camera does not look away at the right moment, as
it did in 1969, during the early hanging scene.
Those unfortunates who watched Fargo were treated
to one of the characters being fed into a wood chipper. And in
other scenes the camera lingered lovingly over some very grotesque
wounds. The Minnesota-nice characters in Fargo are drawn
as simpletons and moral ciphers who mostly just stand around in
funny hats and say “Geez-Yah.” I guess that’s what film majors and
Hollywood idlers call dark comedy.
The new Grit is literally darker than the 1969
version, with many scenes shot with very little light, and where
there is light there’s often smoke or haze which gives the scenes
an unearthly tone. I guess this is supposed to be arty. Mostly it
just makes the actors hard to see.
The reason the Coen boys give for wanting to remake
True Grit is they had read and liked Charles Portis’s 1968
novel by the same name. No puzzle here. Portis’s novel, told from
the point of view of 14-year-old Mattie Ross who pays U.S. Marshall
Rooster Cogburn to track down her father’s killer, is a charmer and
well worth the reading time.
The Coens said they wished to tell the story from Mattie’s
perspective and to stay closer to the book than director Henry
Hathaway did in 1969 with the Duke. They sort of achieved this, but
not by much. Aside from a sentimental, non-Portis ending to the
1969 version, Hathaway stayed pretty close to the book. The Coens
went with the less old Hollywood ending.
But considering the characters in the book, the Coens
mission was doomed to failure, or to at least only meager success.
The Mattie in the book, an engagingly unreliable narrator, is a
charming character, at once tongue in cheek and realistic. By turns
insightful beyond her years and naïve as any 14 year-old. She’s
stubborn, opinionated, bossy, sometimes downright irritating. She’s
full of questionable folk wisdom and Bible quotes. In short, a lot
of fun to read along with. And she’s the center of the
book.
But it’s much harder to make a quirky 14 year-old the
center of a movie. You can keep a character like Rooster Cogburn
pretty much contained on the written page. But on the screen there
is no way a prim 14-year-old girl is going to drag attention away
from Rooster. And the new Mattie doesn’t, any more than the old
Mattie did.
A word or two about the two Roosters. The
Rooster Cogburn role was made for an aged and weathered John Wayne.
The Duke was blustery and almost as big as the scenic outdoors his
western movies were filmed in. He looked physically intimidating
enough for the job of hauling bad guys back out of Indian
territory, dead or alive. On the other hand, Jeff Bridges, a fine
actor, doesn’t.
Where the Duke’s Rooster dominated every scene he was in
with his sheer physicality and vigor, Bridges’ Rooster is hunched
and ratty and looks like he should be sleeping under a bridge. He
exudes a certain meanness and low grade grouchiness, but this is a
world away from toughness. He uses a gravely voice that makes it
often hard to understand what he’s saying. Duke’s rooster
convinced. Bridges’ comes up short.
Perhaps not by accident, Turner Classic Movies featured
the 1969 True Grit last night, the day the new
Grit opened in theaters. Those who stayed home around the
tube got the better of it. No need for anyone to abuse any holiday
leisure with the Coen brothers’ latest.
