Thus, what they would do next was anyone’s guess, although I would bet no one speculated that they would tackle a straightforward remake of one of the most cherished of westerns, True Grit (1969), a film for which the iconic John Wayne, then in the twilight of his career, won an Oscar. Yet, here we are, with the Coens giving their take on the material, which sticks closer to Charles Portis’s 1968 novel (including the first-person narration by 14-year-old Mattie Ross) and replaces the Duke with Jeff Bridges, whose previous collaboration with the Coens 12 years ago in The Big Lebowski (1998) resulted in the creation of Jeffrey Lebowski, aka “The Dude,” one of the most cultishly revered characters in modern cinema. I doubt that Bridges’s take on Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn, the aging, surly, drunken federal marshal at the heart of True Grit, will develop such a rabid following, although that should not be taken as a knock on Bridges’s performance. Rather, he so fully inhabits the grizzled, cantankerous character, particularly in his mush-mouthed growl, that you forget he is an actor playing a role. In the tradition of Bridges’s best performances, he fully disappears. The Coens do something similar, as they reduce the irony and caricature that frequently defines their films in favor of a more direct approach to the genre material, resulting in a film that is consistently engrossing and suspenseful, with flashes of dark humor that offset the gradual revelation of genuine sentiment.

As in the novel and the original film, the primary character is really Mattie Ross (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld), a headstrong 14-year-old who marches into the frontier town of Fort Smith, Arkansas, to settle the affairs of her father, who was gunned down by an outlaw named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Mattie’s unwavering intent to avenge her father’s death brings her to Rooster’s door, which happens to be the door to an outhouse where Rooster is determined to spend quite a bit of time and refuses to come out. As she does with everyone with whom she does business (including a horse trader played by Dakin Matthews), Mattie eventually wears Rooster down with her furrowed resilience and lightning fast tongue, and he agrees to find Tom Chaney (Mattie is, in many ways, the perfect vehicle for the Coens’ love of twisting turns of phrase and rapid-fire dialogue, which here combine the saltiness of the horse opera with the deft fluidity of a screwball comedy). Rooster tries to resist her tagging along, but she insists, as does a humorless Texas Ranger named LaBouef (Matt Damon), who has been tracking Chaney for several months and wants to bring him to justice for shooting a senator and his dog in Waco.

Once again shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, who has worked on virtually all of the Coens’ films since Barton Fink (1990), and scored primarily to old hymnals, True Grit is a gorgeous western that revels in the contrasting widescreen glories of open landscapes and hardened faces. The Coens have always loved the details of time and place, and True Grit evokes the barely civilized wilderness of post-Civil War Arkansas with both power and dark humor. They establish the stakes of frontier justice by introducing Rooster in a courtroom where he fails to prove self-defense in gunning down several outlaws, which only stokes Mattie’s resolve to have him in her service. Mattie is the very epitome of civilization, with her fresh-scrubbed face and perfected twined pigtails, yet she is every bit as relentless and savage in her quest for justice as Rooster, albeit without any direct experience of what her endeavor will entail. The film makes no qualms about the nature of their quest, particularly in a scene in which Rooster and Mattie’s interrogation of a desperate young outlaw nursing a leg wound and his burly partner turns into a sudden explosion of violence that pushes the film’s PG-13 borders.

Often derided for being cynical and ironic at the expense of character and emotion, the Coens display a flair for sentiment in True Grit that might be surprising, even to those of us who have long held that such criticisms are inflated and often off-base. When played by Wayne, Rooster Cogburn was a larger-than-life screen presence who worked as a not-so-subtle parody of Wayne’s iconic status, but as embodied by Bridges, he is a more complex entity, a man who is both pathetic and impressive. Frequently drunk, sometimes unintelligible, and always brusque, Bridges’s Rooster is an enigmatic character who grows on us, so that when the narrative eventually demands that he step up and play the traditional hero, it actually works. The mythical manner in which the Coens depict Rooster’s third-act heroics, which involve both cunning and almost superheroic determination, cuts through all stylish pretense and asks us to accept it on a purely emotional level. It works beautifully, carrying us right along with the wounded characters and arriving at an epilogue of simple, poetic beauty. I don’t suppose it would be much of a stretch to imagine that the Coens’ next film will be some kind of zany comedy.

Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick

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