True Grit (2010)

I don’t have the energy to write a full review, and I’m guessing that this is one movie that will be watched by many on this blog, and they can do it more justice than I. Suffice it to say that the Coen brothers True Grit is completely engrossing. It is the funniest of their films that I can recall seeing. The humor is all in the dialogue.  I have not read the 1968 novel upon which both versions of the film are based, but I gather that the dialogue in the Coens’ version is taken much more directly from the book. It is uncannily like the archaic constructions of Deadwood, without all the “cocksuckers” thrown in. The dialogue makes every exchange a delight, whether it is Mattie’s negotiation with a horse dealer at the start of the movie, or the surprisingly tender discussion between Mattie and the outlaw Lucky Ned near the end.

Jeff Bridges as Rooster Coburn hams it up a little (OK, a lot), but he is generous enough  to yield the limelight to Mattie Ross (played by newcomer Hailee Steinfelt), and she grabs it and quietly dominates every scene she is in. It is a bravura performance.  The other star is the scenery. After so many films built around dark interiors, the Coens, in this film and in No Country for Old Men, have discovered the capacity of the open mountain ranges and forests of the American West to astonish.

11 thoughts on “True Grit (2010)”

  2. Thanks for getting us started, Chris. Let me add a bit:

    Overall, I’m left feeling this could have been a far greater film, though every time I imagine some area that could have received improvement, I come up with dreck. For instance, I wonder if there should been more of the Ned Kelly bunch. No, don’t think so. Probably the right amount. More Tom Chaney? No. And Josh Brolin gave just the right performance, too. His Tom Chaney is dumb, pathetic, terrifying.

    This leads me to wonder why, then, LeBoeuf could not capture him after all these months. Is he as inept as he seems at the film’s outset? Not really, unless he improves in all aspects by the film’s end. Is that a flaw in the film? If so, how is it fixed?

    Chris is right, the film is beautiful. But not that beautiful (I found the landscapes of No Country for Old Men more beautiful). Maybe it was the snow, which gives the worst performance in the film.

    One of the best scenes, which Chris rightly singles out, is when Mattie negotiates with the horse dealer. The film is sort of downhill from there, but thanks to the performances of both Steinfeld and Dakin Matthews (who plays the horse trader, Col. Stonehill) and the Coens’s direction, the film has been lifted sufficiently high enough, and we enjoy a wonderfully engaging glide back down to the ground.

    I’ll be thinking of this film for some time, and I imagine it’ll grow fonder in my mind than not. For now, I’d like to offer up the obvious, which is that this is a very well-made western, which may be exactly what the Coen brothers were aiming for. Some nice, slow dissolves of silhouetted riders, some exciting gun fights, including a great showdown, and of course great dialogue. The lines are delivered really well, too. Not like with some recent stabs at the western idiom, where everything sounds like it was read, rather than spoken.

    Which leads me back to the performances, some of which I mention above. Chris is right: Steinfeld is great. I’d like to add Matt Damon to the list. I thought he was quite good as well (it’s great that he bites his tongue during a gun fight. Better still that it doesn’t shut him up).

    Overall, I enjoyed this. Still, I wonder if I am looking past its faults. If so, I imagine the Academy won’t be.

  3. I quite enjoyed this, for all the reasons named, and felt it never blew through “enjoyable,” as John says. There is a commitment to character–on the part of the actors and these directors–which is kind of astounding. There are the familiar comforts of a pretty traditional narrative arc (and the delight in old-tyme style, most visible in the traveling-through-woods montage which seemed such an explicit call-back to so many classic westerns). The risks and Coenic strangeness are all grounded in performance — Bridges chewing each word like a plug of tobacco; Makin (WOW) finding every nuance in the slight twitch of his eyes to the left or right; Steinfeld staring, staring, staring.

    This isn’t faint praise: it’s a warm (!), tough, funny as hell film. I thought the last few minutes–the frantic ride that closes the central plot quest, and the years-later coda–were … brilliant. You might expect generic nostalgia, but here the Coens do challenge convention; the scene of Mattie silhouetted under one angled tree and in front of a few tombstones, with her no-nonsense voiceover dismissing the problem of marriage. . . there’s a sense of loneliness and loss that made me shudder, gave the whole film a retroactive jolt and emotional impact.

    Good stuff.

  4. we watched this today. very enjoyable but unremarkable, i thought. some very good performances, great script, but not finally a whole lot of there there. perhaps this would have been a lot more startling 15-20 years ago, but at this point there’s not a whole lot of surprise left in the revisionist western. deadwood, dead man and other stuff without the word “dead” in the title have done that work in ways both more baroque and weird than this.

  5. I’m not sure I would call this a revisionist Western, or that that was the goal of the Coen brothers. I agree with Mike that they simultaneously pay homage to westerns and destabilize them in places (the last scene is powerful in that respect), but I really don’t think they are self-consciously trying to reinvent the genre. If we look for that, we will be disappointed.

    This is, again as Mike points out, above all else, character-driven. It is as much a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl as anything else. And as such, I thought it worked. There is a simplicity and craft to the way the movie builds these scenes around Mattie and then watches her navigate her way through them.

  6. i didn’t mean to suggest that i think the coens are interested in critically evaluating or re-imagining the western (and one could argue if so minded that no country for old men already did that); merely that the film hits many of those same beats that the more conscious revisionists do (and i believe the book itself was self-consciously revisionist). it’s not on unfamiliar ground in that sense.

  10. mike was recently interviewed by a minneapolis television news channel. they wanted his views on the new edition of huckleberry finn which substitutes “slave” for “nigger” and “indian” for “injun” in the text. he was the pro voice in the interview.

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