True Grit: Way Out West, There Was This Fella...

Has there ever been a pair of filmmakers with a keener, more exuberant love of American slang than the Coen Brothers? That’s what I always loved most about their films, especially their earlier pictures—the way they devised a whole new style of “special speaking” with each new script: the woozy ten-dollar-word white-trashisms of Raising Arizona; the submachine-gun gangland patter of Miller’s Crossing; the movie-drunk Preston Sturges banter of The Hudsucker Proxy; the way they made music out of the across-the-buffet-table Midwestern “yah!”s and “y’know”s of Fargo as well as the Dude’s laconic, behind-the-beat “like”s and “man”s in The Big Lebowski. The Coens have said in numerous interviews that one of the main reasons they wanted to do a new film version of True Grit is that they feel the 1969 John Wayne version didn’t use enough of the tangy 1870s vernacular from Charles Portis’ original novel.

And so, I get the feeling that the Coens have kind of stumbled backwards, Rooster Cogburn-style, into making the most straightforwardly plotted, sweet-natured, even sentimental film of their career. True Grit has its moments of the Coens’ trademark dark humour (especially a couple of grim gags involving hanged men), but they have thankfully abandoned most of the nothing-means-anything nihilism of No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man. In fact, for the first time since The Big Lebowski, True Grit features some main characters that the Coens actually seem to like and who they’re rooting for.

The heroine of the story is 14-year-old but resourceful-beyond-her-years Mattie Ross (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld), who hires drunken, broken-down, one-eyed U.S. marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track down the man who shot her father dead before lighting out for the territories. Cogburn doesn’t much care for the idea of babysitting a little girl on a manhunt in Choctaw country, but Mattie refuses to be dissuaded. Besides, when you’re forming a posse, it’s probably a good idea to have at least one sober person in the group. They’re joined during much of their trek by a Texas Ranger named LaBeouf (Matt Damon), who’s been hunting the same man for some time now on an unrelated murder one state over.

The bickering between these three people—almost none of whom want to be around the others, but who all come to respect their bravery, their sense of honour, and yes, their grit—is simply tremendous fun, and I assume much of the dialogue was lifted straight from Portis’ book. Think Deadwood crossed with Mark Twain; it’s the language of the pulpit cross-bred with the language of the carnival barker and the barroom braggart. It’s not enough to insult a man in the world of True Grit; you need to out-vocabularize him as well. Well, maybe not always… when Bridges, trying to demonstrate his prowess with a gun, misses an easy shot, Matt Damon’s delivery of the line, “I thought you were going to say the sun was in your eyes… or should I say, ‘eye,’” something about the sheer dumb obviousness of the joke makes me smile every time I think of it.

The best parts of True Grit are offhand moments like these, and maybe it’s the gap between the intimate scale of the character relationships and the air of ominous, cloud-gathering portent that surrounds them, courtesy of Roger Deakins’ cinematography and Carter Burwell’s score, that keeps the film from completely gelling. It doesn’t help that the Coens can’t resist deflating the group’s final confrontation with the man they’re hunting (Josh Brolin). Even so, the film does recover somewhat with an epilogue set some 25 years after the main body of the film and featuring an actress named Elizabeth Marvel, who in very little screen time makes a strong impression as the older version of Mattie Ross, a woman who—not to give anything away—wears the effects of her childhood adventure very obviously. I see from her IMDb page that Marvel once played Louisa May Alcott in a TV biopic, and she very effectively suggests the flinty, battleaxe determination that characterized so many of those strong-willed 19th-century female activists. “We had some lively times,” says the grown-up Mattie, thinking back on her days with Rooster Cogburn, and I think I’ll recall True Grit with something of the same stoic affection too.