The Coen Brothers
Starring: Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Barry Pepper
When I heard that the Coen brothers were remaking the 1969 John Wayne oater True Grit, I was puzzled. Which way were Joel and Ethan going with this one: a satire of the western genre, which they are eminently capable of, or a serious reworking of the film with dark ironic themes, which they cuttingly expert at. Their True Grit is very much the latter. It is a harrowing journey into the murderous frontier of 1879 Arkansas and the lawless Choctaw Nation to its west. It is also one of the finest westerns ever made.
Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) a spirited and somewhat prickly 14-year-old girl, comes to town to settle the affairs of her late father, who has been recently murdered by Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Her business includes settling on some horses and personal effects (including a Colt Dragoon pistol) and hiring someone to hunt down Chaney and bring him to justice, though there are intimations that her intentions do not always include the court system.
When Mattie asks the sheriff to suggest men to hire for the hunt, he mentions an expert tracker who is half-Comanche and another man who has an excellent record for bringing his man in for trial. He also speaks of Rooster Cogburn – “a pitiless man, double tough.” Intrigued, Mattie goes to the courtroom to see Rooster give testimony. Under cross-examination, it becomes apparent that Rooster has killed dozens of men – the two most recent ones evidently under circumstances close to murder. Mattie has found her man.
Rooster is of course played by Jeff Bridges. The Duke’s Cogburn was . . . well, “gruff but lovable” is the hackneyed expression that comes to mind. Bridges’s Cogburn is far less endearing. In time, we learn that he was a bushwhacker in Quantrill’s band during the Civil War, robbed a bank in New Mexico, and will promise a dying man to bury him then ride off saying he should have died when the ground wasn’t so cold and hard.
Bridges’s middle-border inflections, colorful idioms, and facial insinuations are brilliant. Had he not won the Oscar recently, he’d have surely gotten one here. It’s a shame he didn’t anyway. I’d like to shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar. I’d like to do the same for Hailee Steinfeld but I bet she doesn’t smoke.
The comic relief John Wayne brought the original is ably but more subtly provided by Matt Damon as LeBouef – the boastful Texas Ranger whose spurs jingle-jangle and who rides tall in the saddle and tells tall tales as well. Mattie, somewhat prickly, likens him to a “rodeo clown.” LeBouef is tracking Chaney for another murder and makes a deal with Cogburn, then breaks it off. He comes and goes but tends to show up at opportune times. And he’s a “bully” shot with his Sharps carbine, even when it isn’t resting on Gibraltar.
Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper give fine though brief performances. Pepper, in appearance and voice, seems to be paying homage to Robert Duvall’s performance as the same character – and did a darn good job too. Pepper is part of anther homage. He was the scripture-quoting sniper in Saving Private Ryan, and he is killed by a sniper (fellow SPR actor Matt Damon) who whispers “O Lord” right before he fires. The Duke gets his homage, too.
The bleak ordeal of tracking down Chaney brings them across the desiccated and crow-pecked corpse of a hanged man, a surreal rider wrapped in a bear hide, and various ne’er-do-wells, two of whom are killed not five-feet from young Mattie. The original was filmed in the sunlit verdure of the majestic Colorado Rockies. The remake was done in the cheerless, unforgiving wastelands of New Mexico as winter sets in. No country for young girls. What was it that Lew Wallace said about my New Mexico? So close to Texas, so far from God? Roger Deakins’s astonishing and moving cinematography conveys this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0-dXh_IsiQ
In the end, they get their man – that is to say, Mattie does. She commands the now unarmed Chaney to stand up and when he complies, she shoots him dead. The recoil of the .52-caliber Sharps carbine knocks her backward and she falls into a serpent-filled abyss.
The penultimate scene is powerfully moving and almost wordless – a hallmark of great filmmaking. Rooster carries the wounded Mattie to a trading post in the small hours and fires a shot to signal his approach and distress. We see a warm light come aglow from inside, and a door slowly opens sending more light. Mattie will live. Fade to black.
The film ends with a look at Mattie a quarter century later. Her experience in the Choctaw Nation has not ennobled her or left her with abiding friends and fond memories. She is a cold and hard-edged spinster. Long gone is the occasional sweetness, warmth, and femininity that commingled with and offset the acerbity of her youth. Gone too is an arm – snake venom. It’s all so sad to see.
The Coens have taken up Stanley Kubrick’s penchant for puzzling codas that force us to go back over what we just saw. (To wit, the tornado scene in A Serious Man, but that’s another story.) Mattie has slept in a coffin near the bodies of hanged men, seen a corpse bartered back and forth with and without its teeth, and witnessed her beloved horse ridden to exhaustion then put down. And she has killed a man. This has left hard marks.
The jarring coda provokes the question, how could we think such a violent and morbid ordeal would not have deeply affected a 14-year-old girl – and largely for the worse? What mythic ideas of violence and the West, from Frederick Jackson Turner to the Duke himself, prevented us from not sensing all this halfway through?
Copyright 2011 Brian M Downing