Screen Machine

Review: True Grit

True Grit is the Coens’ most genial film. Not their most personal (2009’s A Serious Man), but the least permeated by that restless, cerebral energy which occasionally pitches their work over into empty cynicism. Less an affectionate riff on the conventions of the western than it is a full-blown tribute to the genre, True Grit is also aesthetically faultless, a continuation of a purple patch that now stretches four films from No Country for Old Men. For a film that only began shooting in March of last year and premiered in December, it is an outstanding technical accomplishment.

We expect this from the Coens, though. We know they’re perfectionists. What is surprising is the transparency of True Grit’s moral universe. It possesses neither the existential turmoil of A Serious Man nor the misanthropic near-nihilism of Barton Fink or No Country. True Grit is an inviting work, even crowd-pleasing—and to be honest, that weirds me out.

This warmth is partly attributable to the source text. True Grit is based on the 1968 novel by Charles Portis, in which fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross enlists the help of trigger-happy, hard-drinking Deputy US Marshal Rooster Cogburn in tracking down the man who murdered her father in cold blood. Though the Coens’ adaptation is a far cry from the first attempt to bring the book to the screen — a stiff, bright-coloured 1969 version starring John Wayne — it adheres to the book enough to feel less “Coenesque” in its plot and preoccupations than any of their films bar The Ladykillers.

There’s the usual roster of Diane Arbus-worthy supporting characters, of course, and the period setting allows the Coens to indulge their passion for the rhythms of regional life and speech. Unlike the heroes in many of their films, though, Mattie, Rooster and Matt Damon’s LaBoeuf are all fundamentally (and unambiguously) decent people. True Grit’s villains, on the other hand, do not entirely bear out their bad reputations—but the “crook with a heart of gold” character type does not muddle our moral compass any more than “well-meaning lawman with a drinking habit”. With only one significant exception, the film is populated with good guys and bad guys and we know which is which. It’s not quite Black Hat vs White Hat, but it’s as close as the Coens have ever come. Even Fargo, enamoured of the saintly Marge Gunderson, never felt so damn upright.

For this reason, I think, True Grit is a minor work in the Coen canon. The lyrical pessimism and amor fati that haunt No Country, Blood Simple, A Serious Man and even The Big Lebowski constitute the vital spark of the Coens’ artistry. Metaphysical certitude is not unbecoming to them, but it’s a less compelling thematic choice.

Maybe they were conscious of this when crafting the final sequence, a melancholy postscript which sits awkwardly with the rest of the film. It’s a reassertion of that familiarly inhospitable worldview, emphasising the fragility of human intimacy and happiness (and sounding the film’s one and only equivocal note regarding Mattie’s headstrong autonomy). As far as I’m aware, this ending is true to the book — certainly more so than the smiles-all-round horse jump that concludes the John Wayne film — yet it could just as well have sprung from Joel or Ethan’s head.

I’m obviously a devotee of the bleak, ambiguous Coen universe, and so perhaps this finale should be a welcome return to favourite themes. In practice, though, it jars. Better that the denouement be too cynical than too sentimental? Absolutely. But True Grit’s rousing, unironic account of human lives and pursuits does not build a solid foundation for the final grim argument to rest upon. Perhaps this is a case of the artists not fully committing to an alien theme and approach, or perhaps the flaw lies in the source material (there’s an interesting discussion to be had, I think, about who bears what responsibility in film adaptations). Either way, the ending doesn’t work.

The film strikes a better balance between hope and despair in the earlier night-ride sequence. Here Rooster finally repays Mattie’s love with an act of fortitude that mirrors her own. We see that by her abiding (though perhaps irrational) faith in a fundamentally just existence, she has finally jolted him out of whisky-fuelled ennui. This haunting passage, with its too-starry sky and strange visual effects, is a clear homage to Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter; like that film, True Grit (until its final minutes) celebrates the unshakable convictions of childhood, recognising in them a prism by which to distinguish meaning in a bitter world. That is: the universe may be inscrutably monstrous, in the final analysis, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enjoy our stay. The Coens could have stopped there.

Yosh is a creative writing major at the University of Melbourne. He cries at sad films.

→ more articles by Yoshua Wakeham