This is the fifth and
penultimate installment in my bi-monthly 2018 series revisiting Coen brothers
movies I didn’t think were so great the first time I saw them.
True Grit had a
distinct disadvantage over the other movies in this series, as it was the first
I’ve revisited for this series (though not the last) where I was struggling to
stay awake when I first watched it. December 2010 saw the release of two high-profile
movies starring Jeff Bridges, and I watched both of them as part of a
theatrical double feature (which I discussed here if you’re interested). Tron: Legacy was long (125 minutes) and
a bit stultifying, so the 9:30 or whatever show of True Grit was a tough slog for me. I remembered the fight against
my drooping eyelids better than any fight in the movie.
So what do I do when I watch it again in 2018?
I’m not saying these were the worst possible circumstances to give it a second shot, but I did start
the movie after 9 p.m., after a beer, and after I’d gone out running in the
late afternoon, which basically left me for dead once I got home. (I’m not in
as bad shape as that suggests, but I usually do my weekly run at night, after
the kids are in bed, when nothing else is required of me in the hour or two
before I go to sleep myself. When I still had two more hours of children before
their bedtime, and they wanted to walk down to the park after dinner, I think
that was what nearly did me in.)
The benefit of this second viewing was that if my drooping
eyelids won, there was something I could do about it. When you watch something
at home, you have access to a pause button, a luxury you don’t enjoy in the
theater.
I did have to pause True
Grit twice for naps – it’s something I do even during movies that are
really good – but I made it through in one night, which I count as a victory.
Why didn’t I save it until I wasn’t so tired? Well, for one,
it’s a movie I’ve already seen, so better in a way to watch something you’ve
already seen when you’re tired, than something whose details are entirely new
to you. Secondly, I’m out of the country for the last week of this month, and I
have lots to do before then, so I just need to keep powering through my various
viewing appointments before I leave.
And I think True Grit
ended up being the most better of any of the three I’ve rewatched previously
that I didn’t love the first time. (You may remember I started the series with
a movie I have always loved, Miller’s
Crossing.) In fact, it’s probably the only one out of O Brother Where Art Thou?, The
Ladykillers and Burn After Reading
where I would say there was an appreciable uptick in my feelings toward it. So,
in the end, a second sleepy viewing was not a mark against it.
Of the five movies in this series that I didn’t really love
(the fifth of which I’ll watch in December), True Grit is probably the one where I’d have the hardest time
articulating what it wasn’t I didn’t like about it. (Leading to my theory that
sleepiness had a lot to do with it.) Although I liked it better this time, I
think this viewing also helped me articulate what I didn’t like about it the
first time.
Simply put, this narrative does not proceed forward with
what I would consider to be cleverness. The key to a good chase movie – which many
westerns are – is that the reason the pursuers stay hot on the trail, or lose
the trail, is because of something essential about them: tracking ability,
ingenuity, instinct, or on the negative side, maybe a fatal flaw.
Nothing is gained or lost in True Grit because of anything the characters do or don’t do. It all
feels pretty random. They are tracking Tom Cheney based on some smartly
collected intel, but then they lose him without any real reason – one day two
of the three main characters just declare that the trail has gone cold. So
without any reason you can point to, the mission has gone from trending toward
success to trending toward failure. It’s the end of the second act, the moment
of the characters’ greatest crisis, but as no result of anything they did or
did not do.
Then when Mattie does spot Tom in the river, it’s just
completely random. Through nothing they have intentionally done, they stumble
across him, and she even wounds him (though he ultimately drags her off). A few
of the other twists and turns at the end revolve around similar dumb luck,
almost – dare I say it – deus ex machina,
which is a dirty word in narrative storytelling. Confusingly, Rooster Cogburn
is kind of part of a different climax with Ned Pepper, that’s occurring
alongside the one with Tom Cheney. Cogburn, nominally this story’s hero (it’s
really Mattie), does not even participate in the Cheney portion of the climax,
though he does help save her from that very unlucky snake bite (deus ex machina again – or maybe devil ex machina in this case?).
If the Coens’ point is that the apparent grandeur of the old
west is indeed so illusory, then that would certainly be consistent with other
downbeat and cynical endings of theirs (I’m looking at you, No Country For Old Men). Heroes are
drunkards, and spend time on trial for the people they killed; villains are
basically just dumb hicks who get caught in rivers with their pants down. I get
it. It’s just pretty unsatisfying.
Except as I said, it did satisfy me more this time. It may
have satisfied me a whole star more. In looking back in Letterboxd, I see that
I gave True Grit 2.5 stars the first
time around, probably because I felt that much of what was supposed to be
distinctive about it was the suspiciously underdeveloped personalities of
Cogburn and LaBoeuf (Le Beef as Cogburn says), whose name is only the first way
in which his character is played for comedy. Yet if doling out stars for this
movie today, I might go as high as 3.5.
As much as I was at a loss to tell you what I didn’t love
about it the first time, I’m equally at a loss to tell you now what has
dramatically improved. One thing is surely that I have a much greater
appreciation for Hailee Steinfeld, who was in her first feature film role here
but has since blossomed into one of our most promising young actresses. I
actually thought at the time (and still think) that she delivers some of the
Coens’ dialogue awkwardly, or maybe that they wrote dialogue that was too
awkward for her to deliver naturally – which is interesting because she
actually received an Oscar nomination and her performance was one of the film’s
most praised elements. But I do like her a lot more in general now, so being
reminded of her origins was undoubtedly a positive thing.
I guess I’m also a bit more predisposed to the Coens’
nihilism. If I was bothered that the film is essentially a collection of random
stuff that results in a positive outcome, I’m probably a bit less bothered by
that now.
I still don’t think the cinematography, from frequent Coen
collaborator Roger Deakins, is one of the greatest examples of his work,
either, though he was also Oscar nominated (one of his infamous 13 nominations
before he finally won for Blade Runner
2049). There are some good vistas, but I noticed other moments when the
lighting seemed blown out, almost like the celluloid was bleached. I don’t
think it’s fair to automatically credit a western for its cinematography just because
of the landscape in which the photography occurs. I suspect a little of that
was going on here.
But like I said, I was more favorably disposed toward this
movie than I was the first time, and no longer need to look sideways at people
who say they love it. It’s definitely pretty good. I just wish there were a
little more there there.
Okay, wrapping up this series in December with the film that
is the Coens’ most recent, though won’t be by the time I watch it. I’ll watch Hail, Caesar! for the second time two
months from now, and probably before then, The
Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which debuts on Netflix on November 16th. A post on that, but not under the Re-coen-sidering
banner, may also be forthcoming.
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