It may be blasphemous, but I have no great love for John Wayne as an actor (I rather doubt that I would have had great love for him as a person, either, though that's beside the point.) Like many of the great actors of Hollywood's early days, his larger-than-life presence is both striking and admirable. It's also, especially later in his career, distracting. It's true that many of his great films are great precisely because he's in them. It's also true that it's impossible to separate the characters which he's portrayed from the character that Wayne created. This is all a terribly long-winded way of getting around to the fact that I haven't seen the original True Grit, nor, incidentally, have I read the novel by Charles Portis. So I come at this one with fresh eyes.
Just as it is impossible to think of Henry Hathaway's 1969 film without thinking John Wayne, Jeff Bridges equally commands this one. He's that rarest of breeds among big stars--an actor almost entirely without ego, or at least a good enough actor that you don't notice or mind what ego is there. In this movie, he plays the seedy and perpetually unwashed character of Rooster Cogburn with no vanity except that little which it is believable that Cogburn has. Cogburn is an ornery (an old-fashioned western like this one practically begs for the use of that word) U.S. Marshall (more bounty hunter, really) of limited means and with limited scruples. When Maddie Ross, the daughter of an unjustly gunned-down prospector, rolls into town she chooses Cogburn to track down her father's killer. She has other choices, more thoughtful and just men, but she's not looking for justice. She's looking for vengeance, and Cogburn strikes her as the man to procure it for her in what to her has become a rather dark business deal. Cogburn's introductory scene is in an outhouse. Just a bit later, he's awakened from his perch at the back of a Chinese grocery. In his frayed and yellowed onesie, a button missing, his just-a-bit too large and sweaty gut hanging out, you can practically smell the stale whiskey, sweat, and old cigarettes on his breath. His clothes look like they haven't been washed in years. Bridges doesn't just carry around the trappings of a man with little social grace, he inhabits it. Mattie describes him as an eponymous man of 'true grit'. She could just as easily be referring to his hygiene as to his demeanor. Bridges has quietly made himself into America's indispensable actor, and his Cogburn is a joy to follow around, even when he's mumbling his way through stories of ex-wives and looking like the worst-smelling thing in a place full of stuff that probably smells mighty damn bad. Wayne won his sole Oscar for the original. Bridges could well win another.
Hailee Steinfeld as 14-year-old Mattie similarly gives a great performance as the tough-as-can-be daughter hell-bent on vengeance. Her character gets all of the best lines (meaning the funniest) and as an actress she holds her own with not only Bridges, but Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, as well as a few of the requisite Coen brothers weirdoes. The general lack of Coen-ness of this film, with its straightforward plot and almost-old-fashioned cadences has been much remarked upon. And not without cause: there are moments here, many of them, that would not be put of place in a film of the sixties or seventies. In a different time, John Wayne probably would fit in here just about as well as he did in the original.
It all proceeds calmly apace, free of discernable moral or lesson. That makes it a rare breed, and that's where the Coens come in. Westerns, old and new, tend to fall into one of two categories: the rollicking, if world-weary adventure type (think A Fistful of Dollars) or the hard-earned-lesson type: High Noon, or Unforgiven as a more recent exemplar. Even if the hero never quite learns it, there's often a lesson: in High Noon, it's all about standing up for what's right. In Unforgiven, it's all about the soul-destroying nature of vengeance. The Coen Brothers films often have a kind of ambiguous morality, which, combined with their trademark quirky side-characters and dark senses of humor can make the least of their films, and sometimes the best of them, off-puttingly cold. We tend to expect a tidy moral with our films, and a lack thereof can feel sometimes feel alarmingly like pointlessness. It's the same here. There are no real lessons to be learned in the story of a young girl on a mission of vengeance. There is a price to be paid for her revenge, but it's not clear that anyone comes out the wiser. A beautiful, hallucinatory midnight ride comes at the films climax, and it's a deeply well-earned bit of sentiment in a thoroughly unsentimental film. It all comes down to the relationship between Rooster and Mattie, and the Coens were smart enough to leave the material to their actors, and minimize their well-known flourishes. In doing so, they've created a film that may not be their greatest, but is certainly their most human.
Photo Credits here.
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