TRUE GRITS

“There is no law west of St. Louis. There is no God west of Fort Smith.” – Frontier Proverb

t was my plan to see The Coen Brothers’ interpretation of True Grit on opening day, having a profound respect for Charles Portis’ novel and being an avid fan of the 1969 Henry Hathaway directed adaptation. Alas, the powers that be determined that I would not see the film in some Los Angeles guilded movie palace in the Yule days of December, but rather several weeks later in an attempting-to-be-cosmopolitan movie house in snow-accosted Spokane, Washington. Nevertheless, here is my take on the Coen Brothers offering and the debates surrounding it.

A large source of the debate, in my opinion at least, seems to stem from the idea that the Coens were somehow “remaking” the John Wayne film. I suppose that it is understandable that the common audience would be unable to shake this notion in a time when remakes of previous cinema offerings have become an occurrence of almost ignorable regularity. Paired with the fact that the number of filmgoers in today’s audiences are likely unfamiliar with the text, this has made the underlying murmur a comparison between films rather than a comparative exercise between text and the way in which different filmmakers have envisioned that text.

Admittedly, I started my love affair with the John Wayne film long before I ever sat down to delve into Portis’ book. The 1969 adaptation just intrigued me in so many ways. The film seemed to have a gothic sensibility and a surreal aesthetic that was not to be found in its contemporary western brethren. The characters were offbeat and spoke in strange assemblages of verbage, sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes crude, sometimes a poetic barbarousness that was a puzzling mix of education and incivility. There was a believability of wear and tear and dirt involved in the appearance of the film that was lacking in Hollywood westerns of the time, and the specifics of the firearm references lent a character of hardware absent in a day when every movie cowboy carried a Colt Peacemaker and a Winchester repeating rifle.
There was a nobility to the tale of True Grit that moved me, and yet a very un-American value of greed and revenge that intrigued me, and a callousness and lack of sentimentality towards life and death that I somehow abhorred, but could not shake. And the stories the characters told willed a larger reality into existence than could be contained by the opening and ending credits. Somehow those characters were real… slice-of-life-ish… and I was tempted to believe in them, possibly my first experience with film writing that could create real, living characters that an audience could believe existed outside that celluloid portrait. While obviously a star vehicle constructed around cementing Wayne’s American icon, there were just so many things operating in this film that were awry with the standard process of building a mid-century Hollywood western that I could not ignore it nor brush it aside. To this day it is still one of my desert island film selections. I don’t know that I could live not knowing that I had an access to the 1969 True Grit.

In my mid-twenties, working as administrator of a reading program in a High School library, I came across Portis’ book. There were a half-dozen dust-gathering copies sitting on the shelf in the fiction section and I passed by them innumerable times, always noting that there was the book that that John Wayne movie was based on… always noting that at some point I should read it. I did like to read, after all, and the relationship between films and the books that birth them has always been an interest of mine.

So, over a few mid-morning breaks stolen at Las Fuentes, a Mexican eatery of good repute, I read Portis’ book. And I was amazed. It didn’t take very long into the book for me to realize that everything that had made the 1969 film so undeniably unshakeable for me was actually its almost unrelenting trueness to the text. Everything was there in Portis’ novel. That King James frontier tongue, the wry and witty exchanges, the strong, vividly fleshed out characterizations, the referencing of the Henry Rifle, the Colt Dragoon, the Sharps Carbine, the gothic, Old Testament mentality, the surreal reality of being on the cusp of an uncivilized civilization. Scene for scene, plot point for plot point, conversation for conversation, wry recollections and anecdotes, almost word for word, Portis’ novel had crept onto celluloid in as near unmolested format as I had ever encountered. And it made me feel good inside. Here was a fine book that I felt had been translated into a fine film that did the work justice. I was secure in my admiration of both.

And I’ve carried my True Grit love for some time now. I’ve never encountered another person who actually read the book in my travels through life, but I have encountered a lot of people with poor perceptions of the film. Most of these are critics who first and foremost do not like westerns and therefore I feel were unlikely to appreciate in the first place what I had perceived as the very fine textures the True Grit tale carried within it, but those aside, there have always been the critiques rooted in the genre and technical aspects of the film. Nearly always at the top of the deck is the criticism of Kim Darby’s portrayal of Mattie Ross. “Gads, her acting is so irritating and cardboard,” is typically the observation. And from a point of view of the book, I think my response is that her character is SUPPOSED to be irritating and cardboard. She is a 14 year old girl in the 1877 frontier who has been forced to grow up too quickly. As the eldest child, and with a mother who is not able to step to the task, she has been forced to assume the role of family second. In doing so, she has never actually developed a personal personality. She doesn’t know much of who she is except the role as the one in the family who has to make sure that everything is appropriately taken care of. Keep in mind that a key part of the story of Mattie Ross is the audience’s inability to really feel sorry for her because she does not know how to feel sorry for herself!

Legend has it that Glenn Campbell himself was so disgusted with his acting job after watching the film that he swore he would never act again. In short, Campbell’s performance has never bothered me. I think he pulls off the incredulity and the pompousness entailed by LeBoeuf quite well, and he was a fairly good spar for Wayne while recognizing that it was not his job to attempt and outshine the Duke in his swansong role. Personally, I think there is more criticism to be laid at the droll theme song he recorded for the opening credits than his acting ability.

Anyhow, hearing a couple years ago that the Coen Brothers (filmmakers whose knack for the ironic, surreal, and offbeat has always attracted me to their work, much in the way I was attracted to True Grit in the first place) were going to do a take on True Grit intrigued me very much. It was surprising because I’ve always considered Hathaway’s True Grit as a sort of definitive work of art and it seems that, even with the rash of remakes in the past 20 years, truly definitive works of art have gone relatively untouched (except maybe with the exception of Psycho). Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to new takes on old masterpieces, and I have always thought that there were a few fairly definitive westerns that would be warranted with a remake. One of these is High Plains Drifter. Blasphemy, I know, but looking at the film from the point of view that Clint Eastwood is a malevolent spirit makes some of the very concrete occurrences in the film sources of detraction. Another warranted revision I feel would be John Ford’s The Searchers. While the film is fairly on target with the source text, a serial novel called The Avenging Texans, it could stand some aggressive re-touches more in accordance with the viciousness of the source writing. And I’d love to see Bruce Willis reinterpret the role John Wayne made famous.

But, as usual, I digress. Intrigued I was by the Coen Brothers proposal, so I dug into it a little bit. Early on there was not much information as to what the filmmakers were actually planning, but from what I did find it was made very clear by the Coens that their intention was NOT to remake the Hathaway film, but rather to interpret the original Portis text into their own envisioning. And the more I thought about this proposed endeavor on their part the more favorable I was towards it. You see, for all my love of the 1969 film as an adaptation of a fine book, I could see where different persons than those who produced the Hathaway movie could come away with different ideas of how to tell Mattie Ross’ story. In essence, the Hathaway film had already rendered the tale much more third person omniscient by removing the first person narrative of the text’s introduction and epilogue book-ends. The story of True Grit as written by Charles Portis truly is Mattie Ross’ recollective first-person narrative and the Coens were very implicit about their desire to create a rendition of the book where that point of view was preserved. Sounded good to me.

So, having seen the Coen’s film now, I hold fast to their promise that it was not intended to be a remake of Hathaway’s film and praise them for sticking to their intentions of creating a new interpretation of the source book. And a fine interpretation it is. And while they did disclaim comparisons to the previous filmic incarnation, it is obvious they anticipated the inevitable comparisons by casting with an understanding of who they believed could stand up to the iconic Rooster Cogburn of John Wayne. It is probably without hesitation that I can say Jeff Bridges will undoubtedly be Rooster Cogburn for a generation of moviegoers who do not know John Wayne. And for any one for whom John Wayne has always been the manifestation of the questionable Deputy U.S. Marshall, Jeff Bridges does the Duke’s imprint justice… but the comparison is unnecessary.

That being said, the real comparative analysis of this subject lies in how each of the films match up, not to each other, but rather to the book they were inspired by. As mentioned before, and as was the Coen’s intention, the only truly meaningful difference in interpretation is the presentation of Mattie Ross as the first-person narrator. The idea of the tale being told by an aged, spinster Mattie in the 1920s is blatantly absent from the Hathaway film while the Coen Brothers film begins with the voice of Mattie framing the story with an almost verbatim rendition of Portis’ introductory text and ends with a voice over narration recounting her life contemporary to the telling of the tale. This truer-to-the-text perspective overshadows the film’s occurrences with a much stronger somberness than the Hathaway film. The Hathaway version dramatizes the events prior to Mattie’s arrival in Fort Smith in order to flesh out her character without a voice over narration at the beginning. In the end it substitutes an un-textual meeting between Mattie and Cogburn at a time during her recovery from the snake bite (her arm in a sling as opposed to the Coen’s text-accurate amputation) which creates a basis for a happy ending and a foil for the potentially questionable romantic tendencies Mattie has towards Cogburn, significantly lightening the mood that the book prescribed.

Within those over arching bookends, the Hathaway interpretation of Portis’ text is almost continually, unapologetically dead-on. There is, of course, much editing of the text and we lose a lot of the Old-Testamentish-things-are-the-way-they-are perspective prescribed by Mattie’s Protestant severity because we are not privy to the first person narration Portis provides of Mattie’s outlook. The death of LeBoeuf is also a radical departure. But scene for scene, event for event, and dialogue for dialogue the Hathaway adaptation of the film is densely accurate. Beyond the framing of the story within Portis’ chosen format, the Coen’s film veers this way and that way on numerous occasions and fairly boldly. Mattie’s cornering of Cogburn in the outhouse is a brilliant, but solely Coen Brothers addition, the famed “rat writ writ for a rat” negotiations in Chin Lee’s storeroom are disappointingly absent, the boarding house dinner table sequences have been eliminated (most of the character defining conversation of LeBoeuf has been moved to a slightly disturbing moment in Mattie’s rented bedroom, but the humorously rude commentary on the part of the dinner table patrons is also absent), the entertaining banter concerning LeBoeuf’s Sharps Carbine is edited and displaced, and LeBoeuf takes two un-novelesque leaves of the party over the course of the film (one such departure severely changes the dug-out sequence). There are some accuracies the Coens focused on, including making Mattie look more like the girl depicted on the text’s original cover, Cogburn’s twin Navy Colts, an almost word-for-word rendition of the court room inquiry, and Mattie’s 1920s encounter with the elder Cole Younger and Frank James. I am also fairly certain (it’s been awhile since I’ve taken a close look at the book) that the Hanged Man / Indian Trader / Bear-clad Doctor sequence is a Coen Brothers original. Not that I am complaining about the un-textual fleshing-outs, however. I actually relished the opportunity to experience the Coens toying first-handedly with some of the language and offbeat character aspects that so endeared True Grit to me in the first place.

Ultimately, however, despite its more radical and more numerous wanderings from the text, the Coen’s film more truthfully addresses the text as the story of Mattie rather than that of Rooster Cogburn. Story goes that John Wayne himself identified with the character of the 1968 novel so strongly that he attempted to buy the rights to the text before they were appropriated by the film production company. And as such, the 1969 film, devoid of Mattie’s narration, does play out as the story of the redemption of Rooster Cogburn rather than the coming-of-age story of a 14 year old frontier girl hell bent on retribution. The man even won his only Academy Award for his portrayal of the cantankerous and questionably grey-hatted lawman, even though it is considered that his later performances in The Cowboys and The Shootist were superior. If there is evidence needed to point out just how John Wayne-centered the first film adaptation is, one need look no further than the climactic four-to-one shoot out between Rooster and the Lucky Ned Pepper gang. In this pivotal moment, The Duke wields his trademark Colt .45 and loop-levered repeater rifle, and that sequence becomes all John Wayne. The Coens have restored the textual reference to Cogburn carrying the twin Navy Colts of his Confederate wartime days on his saddle, and as does the character in the book, Jeff Bridges wields these in that final, stirring moment.

The Coens’ film is, of course, far more grey (both texturally AND morally) than its predecessor, but this is more likely the result of 40 years worth of filmmaking experience on the part of the cinematic process. It is however a selling point where the downright realism of the subject is taken into account. The attribute of period pieces made within the past twenty years has been a stronger focus on a period correct appearance, aiming for a sort of timelessness, perhaps. Period pieces during the “golden age” of cinema more often than not suffer from cosmetic indicators of the era in which they were created, and few suffer for realism in this case more than the Hollywood western. 1950s and 1960s hairstyles and make-up abound, blue denim and belt loops are rampant, and everyone has the opportunity to sit on a wired hay bale. Most post-Silverado westerns have attempted a more tactile realism in their execution and films like Unforgiven, Open Range, and The Assassination of Jesse James are possessed of an appearance that is hampered neither by contemporary fashion nor by the myth of a cleanly and fashionably clad west. While I believe that the leaning towards an aesthetic realism on the part of the Hathaway film is one of its strong points, it is assuredly still hindered by the moviemaking philosophies of its time, and the slightly more lived in and worn appearance of the Coens’ film as well as its monochromatic, earthy palette definitely put it on the shelf of realism Portis’ “gritty” book deserves in an adaptation.

Notwithstanding the voice over prologue and epilogue, the Coens’ film still struggles with communicating the viewpoint of Mattie Ross that accompanies the entire textual narrative. Both the Hathaway film and the Coens’ film seem to have approached this task with rendering Mattie a sort of blank slate (provided by her slight lack of a developed personality) that is written on by the questionable individuals she encounters. Where this sort of reactionary-ness was the only tool available to the Hathaway film, the Coens, however, have again drawn on half a century of filmmaking evolution and utilized much of the soundtrack as a communicative tool for Mattie’s viewpoint. The 1969 film sports a big, stirring score typical of the era but relatively void in standing as more than a sonic punctuation for the locales and major plot points of the film. The Coens have more fully utilized the premise of music as character and had Carter Burwell incorporate traditional hymns and spirituals into the aural web of the film. The use of these overtly religious toned themes brings in a definite aspect of Mattie Ross’ Biblical eye-for-an-eye viewpoint that is absent from the Hathaway film and supports the darker conception formulated in the Coens’ interpretation. Even the choice of Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” to accompany the trailers signified a recognition of this retributive preoccupation, and the use of Iris DeMent’s lilting rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” to wrap up the film further cements Mattie’s conception of righteous judgment. The irony, of course, in true Coen Brothers fashion, is that the instrument of God’s judgment has been none other than Godless, amoral Reuben J. Cogburn.

As is apparent, I could go on. But I won’t. It is enough to say that comparison between the 1969 Henry Hathaway adaptation of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel and the Coen Brothers’ 2010 adaptation of same is a moot point. The films are not versions of each other, but rather adaptations of the same text and should be approached as such. When one finds similarities between the films it is likely those similarities are unavoidable because they were both following the text. While the films have differing interpretations of the source book, neither one is detrimental to the original material. They both stand sturdily on their own envisionings of Portis’ intrepid tale and are both worthy of the place they assume in film history.

- Squeezebox Sam