The 2010 version of 'True Grit' from the Cohen brothers is a very different film to the original John Wayne vehicle, almost studies in how disparate adaptations of the same source material could be.
Adventure and colour rollick the Wayne picture along, the 2010 True Grit is a darker and deeper film. If it wasn't for the extreme violence in other westerns of the period (The Wild Bunch was also a 1969 release), the first True Grit might have been remembered as a violent film - it has some vivid scenes that exceed what was depicted in earlier classics - instead of its status as a regular family-fun Sunday afternoon TV-schedule filler. The Cohens' film won't be the weekend matinee destined for repeat showings, but it is a more complete, emotionally dense movie.
In the first version the viewer is encouraged to find the enduring star charisma of the Duke as the Rooster comical, he is gently poked fun at - well, he is kinda old and fat (though not actually much older in 1969 than Jeff Bridges is in 2010), and scenes of drunken clumsiness ring almost true - Wayne by all accounts also liked to pull a cork.
The larger-than-life Rooster Cogburn is one of the iconic roles of the western genre, alongside Shane, The Man with No Name, Ethan Edwards, Tom Dunson, Pike Bishop. (The semi-real roles - Earp, Holliday, Billy the Kid and so on - don't count in the same way, though based on fact, they're actually half-made up before an actor embodies them: skins waiting in the locker-room for the next tenant. This allows such roles to be inflated, deflated and eviscerated depending on the filmmaker's whim, rather than created from scratch with an actor's face imprinted on it). That characters played by Wayne recur in this list runs counter to the notion that Wayne was only ever singularly himself on screen. Wayne - not meaning to blind the reader with technicalities of screen acting - was of the 'not doing very much' school of emoting. A few signature moves: that walk, a twinkly expression that conveys dismay as a combatant in the battle of the sexes, a tougher look that puts younger liberal generations in their pinko place, and a narrowing of the eyes that means business. The rest is the grace of a big man swinging loose limbs and that shoutydrawl (or is it a drawlyshout). In a handful of roles, either when playing older, or in his true aged years, a humane, even sensitive side is glimpsed behind the over-simplified world-view and sentimental toughness. In his most celebrated roles, it is the combination of grimness and tenderness, with the connective tissue of tortured, that lifts Wayne from one-dimensional star to great movie actor. Wayne's Cogburn does not reach the peak (or more importantly the depth) of his Edwards or Dunson; it is in that second rank, though as blatant a vehicle for Oscar as an ageing genre actor could ever have been allowed. But still, The Duke abides.
Jeff Bridges' Ruben 'Rooster' Cogburn is a somewhat different cat to Wayne's. Bridges, regularly praised as a modern day Mitchum (another graceful big lad from the acting school of not doing very much), is a relaxed but commanding figure, as ever. Bridges' 'Rooster' has a Lebowskiesque introduction - gunslinging U.S. marshall as stoner - his natural terrain seemingly the hammock and out-house rather than the prairie. Bridges, lugubrious, bearded, weatherworn, a physical presence but not the bullyboy barrel girth of Wayne. Half of his lines are incomprehensible, the grit and sand attributed to his character sound like they are rattling round his epliglottis. He does of course get his words out for the rather marvellous battlecry, the most memorable line from both films: "Fill yer hands, Ned Pepper, you sonofabitch".
The 2010 True Grit is sombre, it stares death in the face. More than any echoes of a traditional film western it is more Cormac McCarthy inflected it seems to me. The Cohens having adapted one of McCarthy's more generic (but still brilliant) novels (No Country for Old Men), it is as if they are still steeped in that desolate world. Feeling the McCarthy influence on the Cohens in this movie, who knows if Charles Portis (whose 1962 novel 'True Grit' apparently combines the tough-hide, the biblical language, the black humour) was not an influence on his near contemporary the longer-lived McCarthy. The visualisation of this world, a desolate bleached landscape is beautifully captured by Roger Deakins' cinematography. Naturalistic soft-lit it evokes the American rural realism of Wyeth with the same enigmatic visionary quality; throughout the film Deakins' uses a desaturated palette: cool greys of daylight, tobacco and oil-lamp stained nighttimes. He also shot The Assasination of Jesse James which though somewhat strained and pompous, looks beautiful in similar ways.
The Cohens' signature style of camera movement is here - scenes where the camera moves like a character. Their trademark compositions too - a certain depth of field, a certain central placement of figures, a sense of staging, as if the figures are waiting for the viewers to adapt, to adjust their eyes as the curtain goes up.
A storyline that is sparse and linear, the Cohens show that you don't need 3 and a half hours to get that elegiac vibe (even though their pacing can suggest they're not into the whole brevity thing) that revisionist westerns (and the dreary self-importance of most of Costner's efforts in the genre) obsess over.
An epilogue and voiceover ensures that you see the film as Mattie's tale. A darker Twainish adventure laced with death seen through a child's eyes. Several moments are seen from Mattie's perspective, looking up at the grown-up world. Her point of view is used especially when observing adult attitudes - nostalgia, regret, violence. On the child's viewpoint, there is surely something too in the way that nightime, sleep and waking feature as regular signposts in the film. These moments recur over the 5 or 6 nights of the film's narrative bringing a story-ness to the ensuing scenes: chapters in a bedtime story, episodes in an extended yarn told around the campfire.
Kim Darby in the 1969 film is utterly usurped by the newcomer in the Mattie role, Hailee Steinfield pulling off the character as tough, precocious, practical and self-possessed, with a Tom Sawyer-like appetite for gaudy adventure, as opposed to just a cute girl playing young with the comic effect of oversized clothes and a big fringe. The way she takes her deceased Daddy's things for her mission has a texture and nuance in the new version; Henry Hathaway the director of the earlier film was not known as a director sensitive to either acting or mise en scene.
Damon is nicely effective as the Texas ranger, 'Le Beef' (leBoeuf), a witty performance in the Glenn Campbell part (who frankly was poor casting, a lightweight in the earlier film). Surely they just couldn't resist casting Barry Pepper as Ned Pepper (the Duvall role, curiously courteous but mean). The earlier film did have the wonderful benefit of the colourful supporting players of the period : Strother Martin, Dennis Hopper, members of Duvall's/Pepper's gang.
There is inevitably a sense of nostalgia in the remake. The Cohen Bros have trod this line before (think the hat fetishism of Millers Crossing). The iconography of a genre and 'period' detail, like the historical novel allows the author to re-animate old customary twitches of that genre with spasms of their own sensibility: a Frankenstein's monster of authenticity, appropriated archetypes. The animating electricity (good or bad) in revivals of genre is anachronism in some form, either through playing with tone, cliches, stock characters and narrative subversion. The Cohens' approach contains a certain attention to detail that reeks of a genuine respect or a nerdy fandom at least as much as it does an ironist's smirk; anachronistic mock-sincerity always a Cohen concern. This is not necessarily a post-modern attitude alone though. Twain's storytelling is loaded with the author's wry displacing of conventions, furry old eyebrows raised and sideways winks. The film follows a tradition of bloody sincerity and the austere half-mocking voices of Twain and McCarthy. Gallows humour is always ironic.
With their interpretation of True Grit the Cohens continue their own auteurist trail. Their filmic language is not Peckinpahs, Hawks', Ford's or Eastwood's. It doesn't try to re-do a Ford picture, or mimic Leone, or the great Peckinpahs or form a composite of them like a signature book of the genre's motifs. It is definitely a western, but just as definitely it is a Cohen picture. In tone, in addition to McCarthy and Twain, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is the western closest to it - particularly in its waking-dream-like encounters - an unnamed body hung inexplicably high in a dessicated wood; a starlit sky that hangs overhead like a painted ceiling.
There are hints too of Night of the Hunter. A homebound chase at night has a fairy tale quality that subtly releases the emotional build-up of connection within the film and the enduring symbolism of the western genre: horse, landscape, home and wilderness. This scene as un-typical as anything I can think of in a western, moved me in a similar way to the weepiest moment in film this westernhead knows: Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado in Slim's death scene in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, by the stream, Slim's half-built boat, Katy's big ol eyes, 'Knocking on heavens door' starting up. Dagnabbit, I think I've got something in my eye...
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