The Best Movie Critic   +  review

True Grit (2010)

Justin here with some thoughts on my favorite movie for 2010, Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit.

There were a lot of movies that I wanted to see this year that I wasn’t able to for a variety of reasons. Living in a small mountain town means that just going to the movies isn’t an option. I essentially have to plan my whole weekend around going down to Denver to see something. So then, of the movies I saw this year, True Grit was my favorite. However, I don’t think that my assessment is going to change when I get around to seeing Black Swan, The Social Network, The Kids Are All Right, etc.

True Grit is an achievement. It’s easily the best western since Unforgiven and will probably surpass that one handily, time will tell. The performances are uniformly excellent, the direction is perfect, the editing is as good as everything else, the cinematography is breathtaking, and the score is superb. Everything about this movie is close to perfect. If you are serious about westerns or movies in general, then you’ve probably already seen True Grit. If you don’t care about those things, then you probably watched Little Fokkers or Yogi the Bear instead. And if that’s the case, then what are you doing here?

I like Scott McCloud’s conception of story vs. media. A story is like a liquid and a medium is like a container for it. Some liquids work better in different types of containers. You wouldn’t want to put whiskey in a disposable plastic water bottle because the alcohol would eat at the plastic and get a gnarly taste. You wouldn’t want to fill a canteen with Kool-Aid because it would get all sticky. My point is that I’m not really picky about how adaptations or remakes differ from their source material. It’s a consequence of adaptation that the story must be told in a different way when you’re going from printed word to movie. A movie in 2010 is even fundamentally different conventionally speaking from a movie from the late 60’s. Each director has their own kind of jar and every major production decision changes the shape or opacity of the vessel, showing or hiding different parts of its contents.

I am currently reading Charles Portis’ source novel. I haven’t gotten far enough in to make any important declarations as to how closely the 2010 movie follows it, and frankly it doesn’t matter. Conversely, I don’t think that 2010 True Grit makes the John Wayne True Grit any better or worse simply by existing. We have different vessels, different story tellers and different times. I’m really kind of baffled about the public’s perception of the original True Grit on both sides. I’ve encountered just as many people who loved it as who hated it. I love the original and the remake. I’m also surprised that even though the remake has been getting very positive reviews that by and large they are not as enthusiastic as they deserve to be. No Country for Old Men seems to be better regarded. Even though I really loved No Country, I think that True Grit is a much better movie.

The John Wayne version is a legendary thing in my family. I have often heard tell of my Dad proudly bragging that he watched it 6 times in the theater when it came out. It’s a movie him and I watched countless times. About a year ago I watched it with my wife for her first time and she loved it. In terms of quality, it’s lacking in some areas. I’m fully aware that Wayne’s long belated Oscar may have not been fully deserved but was rather a de-facto lifetime achievement award, but that melts away when the movie is on – especially at the end when he jumps over the fence. Both versions of True Grit can live side by side. I imagine that years from now I will watch each version about as much as the other. That said, the Coen Brothers remake is a better movie in nearly every conceivable way.

The paradoxical thing about westerns that I find especially fascinating is that even though they are by definition period pieces, they are more a product of the time in which they were made than practically any other kind of movie. I can watch about 30 seconds of any western and tell you within 3 years when it was made. Westerns reflect their time in the production techniques, the fashions, the dress, the color palette, and even the subject matter and how it's addressed. The post WWII period brought us the age of the infallible good guy western, foreign perspective on American culture birthed the Spaghetti Western, Vietnam-era malaise was largely responsible for the violent nihilistic era that included The Wild Bunch and The Outlaw Josey Wales. I would argue that the original True Grit was produced from the perspective of reconciling the macho John Wayne swagger with the blossoming feminist movement as personified in Kim Darby’s Mattie Ross who was portrayed of a short haired know-it-all tom boy.

To me, True Grit 2010 was produced from the perspective that as a nation we are leaving the post-everything cynicism, fear, and dread of the last decade and moving into something more meaningful. Our heroes in this movie as played by Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges are far from perfect. Unlike Wayne’s slightly pitiful and funny Cogburn, Jeff Bridges is a scary drunk. We’re scarred he may go too far and shoot another lead, we’re scarred he’s going to be too drunk to do his job when he needs to, and we’re scarred that he may simply die before the job is done. He kicks around Native Americans, bad mouths everyone, and beats animals. Damon’s character is principled but kind of a tool. We’re not sure if he can be trusted or if he’s all talk. He’s brave but more than a little stupid. Mattie as brilliantly played by Hailee Stenfield is not as helpless as Darby’s version. She’s headstrong, emotionally blunted and feels wholly authentic. These three taken together show some of the best and worst of humanity. Their quarry, Tom Cheney as played by Josh Brolin is not all bad either. He comes off as a mentally or emotionally challenged misanthrope. There is though no question that what he did was wrong and that he must pay.

It's an acknowledgment of the problems we have and the challenges we face while we strive to do what is good.

Two other things that True Grit did better than any western I've seen in ages and ages. One no one is pretty. I've never watched Tombstone or Wyatt Earp because I simply cannot buy that those pretty boys could have done anything remotely rugged. The prettiest person in True Grit is Matt Damon and he ends up getting the shit kicked out of him so hard by the end that any credibility he appeared to be lacking at the beginning vanished. It's often a moot and weird point, but nothing takes me out of a movie faster than when all the characters have perfect teeth and hair.
Two: True Grit was populated by a bunch of eccentric weirdos. You had to be crazy to leave the comforts of civilization to go out on the range and play cowboy. I hate how romanticized the picture of the west has become. Cowboys and settlers were by and large not good Tea Partiers with strong American and Christen values. Though I'm sure there were those, it is not a representative picture overall because it doesn't include the true isolationists, the people who left the city because they didn't belong, nor did it include the children of those people raised with very specific ideas about morality.

The larger point here that I'm trying to make is that accurate portrayals of what cowboys were like don't exist, but it doesn't really matter. All a movie can hope for is verisimilitude, truthiness. True Grit feels authentic even though it isn't. It feels real. The danger feels real, the dialogue feels sufficiently old-timey, and the film universe feels so far removed from today that it's plausible.

I told Ben I was writing about True Grit for TMA, and he said that there's only so many ways you can say it's excellent. He's right. I haven't even gotten to all the allusions and nods from True Grit to my favorite movie of all time, The Night of the Hunter. At the risk of making this post longer than it needs to be, I'll end with these thoughts: True Grit is a great and important movie and has done more to reconcile the America of today with the America of the 1800's and the America of 1969 than any other movie I've seen. Beyond that though, it's touching and entertaining. It's fantasy and escapism for adults at its best. I was so swept up by the story and the energy that at 25 I finally understood how my dad must have felt watching True Grit with his friends from school on a sugar high from birthday cake when he was 8.