You won’t waste your money going to see this. It’s entertaining and gripping and some of the cinematography is gorgeous. Although, as the Serpentine One pointed out last night, some of the shots have a computer-generated feel about them and that just won’t do for a story whose appeal relies absolutely on its authenticity.
It’s also, for better or worse, very much a Coen brothers movie. There are magnificently constructed suspenseful scenes leading up to violent climaxes that will make you flinch and no one handles this sort of scene better than the Coen brothers.
There are also neatish postmodern touches throughout. When Matt Damon makes his first appearance, everything about him is meant to recall Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid: his hair, his moustache, the way he moves. Except, of course, this being the Coen brothers, he is a travesty of Sundance and the rivalry and partnership between him and Rooster Cogburn is an extended travesty of that other famous western partnership.
So if you are content with a movie that makes its point by referring back not to the old west and the frontier and what that has meant to America but rather a movie that refers back to mythology of the old west as represented in a movie near and dear to the hearts of baby boomers, this movie will amuse. I liked it plenty.
The best thing about it, however, is the spoken language. When this comes out for home viewing, I'm going to buy it and turn the video off just so I can listen to the beautiful language spoken by these actors. If you want to understand just how badly modernity has degraded our language, just listen to this movie and catch a hint of what English could be.
The Bad
There is a rude question about a generation of filmmakers that includes such people as Sofia Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch and the Coen brothers. If they had to abandon their ironic pose and all their postmodern tricks, could they still make compelling movies? Can they actually tell a meaningful story? In the case of the Coen brothers the answer is a definite maybe. Having seen True Grit I can see how they might, with a little effort, figure out how to make a really great movie that doesn’t rely on a little gimmicks to smooth over weak storytelling and character-development.
So far, however, they haven’t quite got it.
The violence is a good example. The Coen brothers have a knack for presenting horrific violence effectively. And that should be a very good thing for True Grit. This is a story that absolutely requires violence and absolutely requires the sort of violence that makes you flinch and look away from the screen. The problem is that it requires this violence at certain crucial moments in the plot and the Coen brothers give it to us in scattered moments throughout.
Imagine a movie where the whole plot builds up to a magnificent moment where a woman has an erotically charged kiss with the man she has always loved. Only, on the way, there are five or six raw sex scenes that aren’t particularly important to the plot. That would rob the crucial scene of some of its impact wouldn't it? The Coen brothers do that with violence here.
There are many beautiful shots of the magnificent west and such shots are, again, absolutely necessary to the story. But a good storyteller tells the story in a way that draws the connections between the two. Here the two kinds of elements just sit side by side without any connection.
The Sublime
You can, however, by squinting your eyes a bit and using your imagination and watch the movie they almost made instead of the one they did and that partly imaginary movie is magnificent.
There was a real wild west; it wasn't just a Hollywood creation. It lasted a very short time between the end of the Civil War and the closing of the frontier. I’d have to look it up, but I think the whole era lasted only 25 years or something. It had a huge impact on our imaginations because it was a period where lawlessness was overcome and replaced by, as Frank Rich (seemingly with regret) put it, “law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage”. And that knife-edge moment when it could have gone either way is irresistible the same way that courtship is a more compelling subject for arts than happy marriage is. In real life, happy marriage is even better than courtship but it isn’t artistically interesting.
The thing that distinguishes the school of western writers of Charles Portis (who wrote the book this movie is based on) and Larry McMurtry is their belief that it was the arrival of women that civilized the Wild West. And the reason that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t fit with them, although he is often grouped with them, is that McCarthy just doesn’t get women.
The story you want to see in this movie is about two themes.
The first is the way Mattie Ross’s changes the men she meets. The second is about the price that has to be paid to make law, religion and domestic institutions like marriage possible.
The Coen brothers don’t quite get that. Here is the way they talked about Mattie in an interview with the New York Times:
“She is a pill,” Ethan said, “but there is something deeply admirable about her in the book that we were drawn to.” Joel continued the thought: “We didn’t think we should mess around with what we thought was a very compelling story and character.” Ethan stepped in: “The whole Presbyterian-Protestant ethic in a 14-year-old girl was interesting to us and sounded fun.”“Interesting” and “sounded fun” just aren’t good enough for the story that has to be told here.
At the very beginning of the movie Mattie has a vision of justice that is primarily driven by vengeance. There is a moment as she and Rooster pursue her father’s killer when Rooster speculates that the man may already be dead somewhere. Mattie says, “That would be a bitter disappointment.” By the end of the movie she has changed.
The clever story telling trick is a rather simple one in concept and it is that it is the older Mattie who has learned who tells us the story but she begins at the beginning so we are not aware of the full significance of what she tells us at the beginning of the story until the end. The very first thing she tells us is this:
“You must pay for everything in this world one way or another. There is nothing free except the grace of God.”That feels like a prologue when we hear it but it is actually the coda of the story. The mention of the grace of God is not a weird Presbyterian-Protestant cultural tick. Because the grace of God was achieved through a sacrifice. It is the person who pays the price who achieves God's grace not the person who extracts. In a sense it is obvious all along who that is going to be and yet it is still a surprise. That's a deep truth. We are perhaps too cynical and wise to let anyone tell us that now. We shouldn’t be.
Bonus Canadian political trivia
Here in Canada the nickname for the Liberal Party is "the Grits". Unlike many political nicknames, this is one they gave themselves. It was a compliment for a certain kind of Canadian liberal in the 19th century to call him a "clear grit". The word "grit" comes from abrasives and a "clear grit" was a man who was solid abrasive with no dirt to soften him; this is the exact quality that Mattie seeks in Rooster Cogburn. It was meant to invoke the sense that this guy could do some real and important abrasive work. If you have ever tried sanding with a clogged up piece of sandpaper you will know what it is to want some clear or true grit.
To look at the people who currently make up the Grits and recall that meaning is to weep.
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