True Gruff

  Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld hit the trail in True Grit

By Nicholas Nicastro 

True Grit. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Charles Portis.

            

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Midnight Cowboy and the original True Grit all reached the screen in the same year, 1969. While the X-rated Midnight Cowboy was (strictly speaking) not a true oater, like Butch Cassidy it approached classic Western themes with thoroughly modern sensibility that made them feel both antiquated and tragic. As the crooked sheriff said to Newman and Redford, “You’re nothin’ but a couple of two-bit outlaws, and your times is over!” And it does seem as if the frontier at the movies did close soon after, seventy-six eventful years after historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the real frontier era closed in 1893.

Henry Hathaway’s True Grit, by contrast, was one of the last triumphs of the traditional Western. Forming a neat bookend to John Wayne’s career, his performance as the hard-fightin’, hard-drinkin’ Federal marshal Rooster Cogburn earned him his only Oscar. The story, about a spunky, hard-nosed teenage girl named Mattie (Kim Darby) who hires Rooster to track down her father’s murderer, is more joyous than tragic, seeming to exclaim “how ‘bout it for the little lady!” every time Mattie shows her own “true grit”. The implication, of course, is that if the girls were this formidable in ye old West, imagine how tough the guys were.

The Coen Brothers (Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, No Country for Old Men) version of True Grit is remarkable insofar as it is follows in the same wagon ruts of the Hathaway version, yet is utterly unlike it in tone. John Wayne played Rooster as pretty much as John Wayne. Falling short of iconic status, Jeff Bridges can’t help but seem diminished by comparison, but also more authentic, as if this is the first time we’ve met the character as novelist Charles Portis intended him. Wayne’s Rooster was an old warhorse; the disheveled Bridges looks and sounds like he’s been stepped on by a horse. He’s Rooster Cogburn for a post-Deadwood world.

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Hathaway’s version unfolded in a park-like setting that might as well have been a national forest. The Coens set it in a ragged, wintry landscape we might associate with Cormac McCarthy. Where Kim Darby’s exploits as Mattie evoked joyful cheers from Wayne’s Cogburn (he positively exults, “Darn it, she reminds me of me!”), Bridges just seems to stare at this Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) through bleary eyes, wondering why she’s wasting so much energy. There was a bit of the bob-haired proto-feminist in Darby’s Mattie, and with it the promise of a bright future. The know-it-all Steinfeld version seems more insufferable than suffragette—an impression the Coens ram home in a codicil showing the adult Mattie living out her days as an acid-tongued old maid.

The Coens shouldn’t be faulted for taking a more autumnal approach. Audiences have moved on since ’69—the idea that girls can be tough in action movies is not radical anymore but has actually reached the point of cliché. Take out the pleasure of that surprise, and there’s not much left but an “odd couple” story with six-guns. What the Coens inject in its place is a sense of historical futility that is more Butch & Sundance than the Duke. I reckon there are less romantic sunsets for a hero to ride into than that.

Copyright 2011 Nicholas Nicastro