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The west has been good to the Coens, with their brilliantly nihilistic No Country for Old Men picking up the Best Picture and Director awards they deserved for Fargo, making a return to the west unsurprising, though their choice of story seems a little strange. True Grit is a ‘reinterpretation’ of Charles Portis’s novel, best known for the 1969 movie of the same name in which John Wayne fell off his horse to win a career service Oscar, and for being one of the last old school Westerns, released in the same year ‘Bloody’ Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch rode into town.
Indeed, of those two films it may be that it is the legacy of Peckinpah’s that has the clearest influence. This True Grit is a more revisionist and much darker affair, unafraid of showing death and pain in a way that wasn’t part of the older tradition. Here Jeff Bridges' Rooster Cogburn is not the clear-cut hero Wayne’s was, Mattie Ross is actually a child, and the Indian nation where they seek her father’s killer is much bleaker and stranger as opposed to the ‘civilised’ west they just left. The result is far more complex than Henry Hathaway’s enjoyable but hardly intellectual version. Here a completely new world’s created, hypocrisy’s revealed and characters, as much as I hate to say this about Mr Wayne, aren’t genre stereotypes. Yes, that apparently boastful claim of being a reinterpretation rather than a remake has considerable standing. What’s more, the darker territory they move into suits the story perfectly, particularly when helped along by a great score, as well as the work of the great Roger Deakins, the Coen cinematographer of choice, who has earned himself a richly deserved ninth Oscar nomination for his use of night and the environment to evoke the rich textures of the Old West in a way that’s just beautiful to behold.
Yet this is definitely not No Country, for although the brothers let a real sense of sadness and loss into the film, it never gains the all-pervading sense of despair common in their recent work. True Grit actually has considerable humour, with the ever-watchable Jeff Bridges vocalising lines with great comic effect, particularly when insulting Matt Damon’s Texas Ranger. Yet the film’s real star is Hailee Steinfield as its lead, whatever the Academy may say – though just 13 when she filmed it, she manages to convey a real sense of passion and worldly wisdom far beyond her years. This, alongside her sheer grit and determination, drives the film onward at considerable pace, whilst also providing the emotional core as Mattie uncovers the world’s darker nature in the wilds of Indian country.
True Grit is not the Coens' most profound work and certainly moves away from the near total bleakness of their recent films. Yet this in no way stops it being an intelligent and extremely entertaining piece of cinema, which is driven along by its excellent leads, extremely impressive visuals and directorial style, making for something similar in story but not in tone to the first adaptation of the novel, a film that it supersedes in almost every department.
See True Grit at City Screen, York. Check out their website for times and further details.
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