Some Thoughts On True Grit (2010)

Last night McChicken and I ventured forth for a rare "out of the house" Movie Night. I've wanted to see the Coen Brothers' version of True Grit since I saw the first trailer for it, and fortunately my gaming compadre was onside with that choice.

I went into the film eager to see how it measured up against Clint Eastwood's 1992 classic, Unforgiven, better known in my brain as "the type of Western I enjoy watching." While the two films are quite different, they also share some common traits beyond the genre itself. As McChicken pointed out while we were exiting the theatre, humour was perhaps the biggest differentiator between the two. Unforgiven's lighter moments were few and far between and carried with them a harder edge when they did show up. Gene Hackman's portrayal of the sheriff, for example, was occasionally played for laughs - such as when he bragged of building his own house while it leaked like a sieve during a rainstorm - but he always seemed like a coiled snake, preparing to pounce if the wrong word were directed his way. Eastwood's "wild" Bill Munny may've had trouble getting onto his horse at times, but any laughs resulting from that situation were quickly silenced by the unrelenting grimness of the man's history and personality.

The Coen Brothers, on the other hand, infused their update of True Grit with quite a bit more levity. From the hardheaded negotiation skills of 14-year-old Mattie Ross (played exquisitely by Hailee Steinfeld, who earned a rather strangely categorized Best Supporting Actress Oscar nom last week) to the sometimes incomprehensible mumblings of Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn and the too earnest-by-half Texas Ranger-aggrandizing of Matt Damon as Ranger LaBoeuf (humourously pronounced as "LeBeef" for most of the film), the audience that we saw True Grit with broke up on a regular basis, present company included. And each such outburst seemed to come just when the screenwriting/directing Coens planned it, which is always a good sign.

Although I have only vague recollections of the original, star-studded version of the film - featuring John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper and a young Kim Darby - it seemed like the new one cleaved very closely to the source material. It's a tale of retribution, moved relentlessly forward against ridiculous odds by the will of the 14-year-old daughter of a murdered man. That quest for vengeance, on the part of a female character, is one of the similarities to Unforgiven. But where the slashed prostitute of the earlier film was willing to pay her bounty and wait for justice to be exacted, young Mattie Ross demands to go along for the ride. The heart of the film is the relationship that develops being the old, crusty drunk (Cogburn) and the bright but bitter-beyond-her-years idealist (Ross). We get the usual ups and downs that are standard fare for such unlikely alliances, but it's all done in a highly entertaining fashion. As with the Clint Eastwood vehicle, each of True Grit's main characters are striking in their distinctness. None are simply there to move the plot along or provide filler; in fact, each has an arc, of sorts, that he or she travels through over the course of the movie.

The final scene of the film is likely to be the one that stays with me the longest. It takes place 25 years after the main story and gives us a glimpse of what those early experiences did, both physically and emotionally, to the adolescent girl who should never had had to undergo them. It's incredibly poignant, in an understated way.

I thoroughly enjoyed Ethan and Joel Coen's True Grit, and look forward to watching it a second time!