True Grits

I am old enough to have seen the original True Grit, with John Wayne, Kim Darby, Glen Campbell, Robert Duvall, and Dennis Hopper, in the theater when it was first released, in 1969, when I was ten years old. I was a big fan of John Wayne when I was a kid, and would be lying if I said I didn't remain one. By god, he was a man, baby.

Yet True Grit, the original, in spite of its indelible moments—"Fill your hands you son of a bitch!"—doesn't rank as one of my favorite John Wayne movies. After I saw it in the theater, I wouldn't see it again until about a month ago, by accident, on AMC, while vacationing with my mother. I liked it, thought John Wayne was great, acting well outside his usual range, but the movie, it didn't do that much for me. I had always blamed my reaction, or lack of one, on Kim Darby, who, when I was ten, wasn't my idea of the sort of girl one went down by rope into a hole filled with rattlesnakes to save. One might say there was confusion in my sympathies. I didn't have the same visceral dislike of Tom Cheney, the killer of Darby's father and the man being hunted (by a drunk and garrulous Federal Marshall, a fastidious Texas Ranger, and a young woman noisy with rectitude), as I did for, say, Bruce Dern in The Cowboys, or the bad guy played by Richard Boone in Big Jake. When John Wayne sticks that pitchfork into Richard Boone's gut and gives it a jerk at the end of Big Jake, you're going, "Fuck yeah!" Not so when Kim Darby blasts her dad's killer. You're more surprised that the gun went off. If you react, it's to the noise.

And we never really see why Ned Pepper (played by Robert Duvall in the original, and, in a typical bit of Coen Brothers cleverness, by Barry Pepper in the remake) is the sort of guy deserving to be shot in the great climactic scene on the clearing, with Rooster taking the reins in his teeth, shooting rifle and pistol both, killing all of Pepper's gang but Pepper himself, who then, just as he's about to shoot Rooster, trapped under his horse, gets blasted by the sharpshooter Texas Ranger (Campbell in the original, the very good Matt Damon in the remake). All of this, and what follows, especially in the remake, with its superior atmospherics and arrangements, its smartly stylized scenes and rhetoric (not to mention fine performances by all), falls flatter, dramatically, than it should. And in the remake, at least, there is no Kim Darby to blame; rather, as with the original, there isn't a worthy villain we can properly hate.

Not surprisingly, the remake is more violent, the gunshots more real, the splatters of blood more garish—I would let my children watch the original, not the remake— and the performances are, to varying degrees, excellent: as with the original (Wayne's, particularly), they do more than their share to carry the story. If Jeff Bridges had not won a best actor award last year, playing a cliched wreck of a musician in the so-so Crazy Heart, he'd win this year, hands down, for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn, a performance so remarkable and nuanced that it stands alone and doesn't beg comparison to Wayne's. Matt Damon, as well, does a fine job as the Ranger LaBoeuf, without at all reminding us of Glen Campbell—though his character is awkwardly left dangling at the end of the remake (Campbell dies in the original, shortly after saving Rooster and Mattie from the pit, one of the few scenes I found clearly more satisfying, as in complete, in the original).

Hailee Steinfeld's performance as Mattie Ross, however, does beg comparison to Darby's in the original—and it is clearly better. She is a far less annoying Mattie, more convincing, and less ridiculous, in her pursuit of what she is after. It is her performance, when one does the math of comparisons, that sets the remake above the original.

Yet there is something more compositionally coherent about Darby's Mattie in the original, something separate from either's performance. The remake, unlike the original, and for no compelling reason that I can tell, is framed, and features an older, nondescript Mattie narrating at the front and back of the story, missing her arm in the end (perhaps the Coen Brothers had been reading Flannery O'Connor of late), walking away, talking about how she never married, how she dug up Rooster's body after he died and brought him to rest on her family's property—none of this is particularly set up by the preceding narrative; in the original, Mattie, still a girl (she is older in the original), ever earnest, with both arms, hints to Rooster of burying him on their plot someday, a suggestion Rooster finds flattering, if fanciful, and unlikely, before he gets his fat self on his new horse and jumps the fence, in a freeze-frame that ends the movie—and ends it more effectively, with a touch of corniness appropriate to the original's tone, than the more macabre and erratically patched coda (typical of the Coen Brothers mean-spirited excess) does the remake. But one can hardly imagine the Coen Brothers ending a movie with a man jumping a horse over a fence.

I've never read the Charles Portis novel on which the movies are based, but it seems to me that what is lacking in both is in the structure of the story, which, having looked at two movie versions now, seems focused overly on the pursuers and not enough on the pursued. One could say the same of a lot of westerns (The Searchers comes to mind), yet for all the great character work that we see in the early scenes of both movies, for all the entertaining antagonism throughout, we don't get enough menace from the villains to make for the satisfying ending we might have otherwise gotten had a real son of a bitch, and not some close to brain dead schmuck like Cheney (played as well as he could be by Josh Brolin in the remake), been pressing the narrative from the start.

And who is Lucky Ned Pepper anyway? What is there to resent, really, about him, and what do we care whether Rooster shoots him or not? Who is he going to bother if Rooster lets him go by? You don't feel that way about the villains in The Cowboys, much less the dog killer in Big Jake.

Still, it's well worth the ride just to see Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie, and Bridges's excellent work as Rooster. Just don't expect your heart to jump when Lucky Ned gets popped, the dust from his torso puffing beautifully as the bullet hits, impersonally, the trigger pulled 300 yards away by the precise Matt Damon, saving his antagonist from a villain neither he nor us knows or cares much about.