Remakes of “classic” movies seem to come in pairs. After Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of Brighton Rock, Joel and Ethan Coen’s version of Charles Portis’ novel, True Grit, previously filmed by Henry Hathaway in 1969 with John Wayne winning an Oscar for his portrayal of ageing bonded US Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, rolls into multiplexes. It is a highly engaging, deeply enjoyable, anti-revisionist Western, which carries in its end credits the disclaimer that the production was not supported by tobacco companies, since it is one of the few current Hollywood productions in which its lead actor smokes. It attempts to be faithful to Portis’ novel, about a 14-year-old girl, Mattie Ross (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) who hires Cogburn for $50 – augmented by regular reward money – to go into Indian territory to bring back her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), to face justice – that is, hanging – in the state where he committed his most recent murder.
The set-up is economical. There is no portrayal of the murder, just a slow zoom-in on the crime scene, lights from a boarding house blazing, Mattie’s father’s corpse lying on the ground as a sparingly used voiceover introduces our heroine. The writer-director-editor brothers spend much of the opening establishing how Mattie gets hold of the money to hire a bounty hunter – there is extensive comic bargaining with a horse trader – and coaxing Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), who we first encounter as the permanent resident of a latrine, to work for her.
The film is striking in its portrayal of its characters’ casually cruel treatment of Native Americans. At an early hanging scene, convicted killers get a chance for last words before the hood goes on and the trapdoor opens. “I killed the wrong man”, says one. “I would not be here if I killed the right one.” The Native American’s ululation is swiftly silenced. Later, Cogburn kicks a Native American child from a porch – and does so again on his way out. The Coens trust that the audience know this behaviour is wrong and they don’t sugar-coat it. The audience is intended to contemplate just how relative justice in the Old West really was.
Cogburn and Mattie are joined in their quest by an over-confident but ineffectual Texas Ranger, LeBoeuf (pronounced “LeBeef”) played by a portly Matt Damon. LeBoeuf also indulges in what we now view as retrograde behaviour, giving Mattie “a spanking” for daring to follow them in their pursuit of Chaney. When he takes out the twine to administer a lashing, Cogburn intervenes.
As in other Coen brothers’ films, violence erupts in a messy, haphazard way or, in two key sequences, from a distance. The Coens preserve one of Portis’ clunky metaphors. When Mattie fires a gun, she falls into a dark cave. Portis is saying: “Retribution takes you to a dark place – literally.” This is too much like an over-insistent nudge in the stomach and flies against the subtlety of the rest of the film.
We get a sense of how difficult life was through a corpse that is hung high up in a tree being traded after it is cut down. It ends up in the hands of a dentist, who tries to sell it to Cogburn, having removed the teeth. There is also a memorable scene where Mattie spends a night at a funeral parlour. The undertaker tells her that if she would like to sleep in a coffin, “that would be all right” (his mantra). Steinfeld gives a forceful performance. As for Bridges, his grumbling effaces the memory of John Wayne, who played the character in two movies. Lest audiences expect a sequel to this, the Coens provide an epilogue that rules one out.
