True Grit

Next week will be the DVD release of my favorite film of last year, True Grit.  Luckily for me I recently “acquired” an, ehem, “advanced copy” of the DVD, in Blu-ray no less (Got to love the internet!).  As such I have the pleasure of seeing the film once again, and perhaps convincing you to purchase it, and in doing so support my favorite eccentric writer-director brother duo, the Coen Brothers, makers of such amazing films as No Country for Old Men, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski.

True Grit is a remake of a classic western movie, starring John Wayne, and based on a book of the same name.  Having seen the original as well, I can assure you that this no simple remake and I have also read that it adheres more closely to the book.  It is, at its simplest form, a story of revenge as a young girl named Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires an old, seemingly washed up U.S. Marshal by the name of Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to hunt down the man who murdered her father.  She of course naturally tags along to make sure he upholds his bargain and they also team up with a bumbling Texas Ranger who calls himself LaBoeuf (Matt Damon).

The greatest things about this movie, as all Cohen brothers’ films, are the characters and the amazing dialogue between them.  Hailee Steinfeld’s performance as the daughter of a murdered father is perhaps, as even the Cohen brothers themselves put it, “too good to be true.”  For such a smart guy, Matt Damon sure seems to play an idiot all too well, and this is probably his best performance as one.  While Jeff Bridges is Jeff Bridges.

This is a film that I feel represents the changing way in which we tell stories, and the differences between this film and the original I believe encapsulates that.  Perhaps no one else represents this changing style better than the Cohens and the touch they put on the Western Genre here is so eloquent and poetic.  The merger of the Cohen brother’s style with that of western is very hard to picture until you see the film and I believe Nicole LaPorte captures it perfectly in her article for “The Daily Beast”

But it’s hard not to sense a new direction, or perhaps maturation, with True Grit, which is the closest the writer-directors, who have been steadily churning out films since the mid-1980’s, have come to making a straight, i.e., non-ironic film. Rest assured, there is plenty of Coen-style absurdity throughout, mostly in the script’s dialogue, which is a blend of King James Bible verse and showy cowboy talk (Matt Damon as a Texas Ranger is particularly amusing), but there are many points at which the film plays like a straight Western. The violence is, for the most part, not funny. And the film’s heroine—played by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld—is a much fuller, more flesh-and-blood character than, say, the more outlandish caricature that was The Dude.

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I do not want to really delve too deeply into the plot, as I feel it is such a great experience viewing it, not knowing what to expect.  I will say this though, while not a western in the iconic, classic sense, I believe this film gets closer to depicting the real Old West, in all it expansive glory, than John Wayne ever could.  If you have not already seen this film, and are looking for perhaps the final chapter in the Western genre than look no further than True Grit.

This Smart Ass gives it…