For Joel & Ethan Coen, who have been puréeing genres and defying expectations since their director’s chair was a two-seater crib, the biggest surprise of all could only be to make a film without surprises.
Coming on the heels of a pair of films that were very much Coen Brothers but failed to make waves in the popular consciousness – Burn After Reading was an unorthodox blend of sex farce and deadly intrigue, while A Serious Man seemed like one long Jewish in-joke, a Polish shtetl populated by rabbis and shlemiels – it seems therefore understandable, if no less surprising, that True Grit’s main quirk is a decided lack of quirks.
True Grit 
Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen |
Narrated by the adult Mattie Ross with what sounds like a decidedly straight face – as opposed to Sam Elliott’s rambling Big Lebowski banter – True Grit follows our protagonist’s recollections of herself as a 14-year-old (Hailee Steinfeld) attempting to track down her father’s murderer and secure closure for herself along with justice for the perpetrator.
Being a Coen Brothers picture, True Grit imbues its 14-year-old protagonist with all the assertiveness and spunk of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Hudsucker Proxy Rosalind Russell/Katharine Hepburn amalgam. (It also tacks on an unrewarding twenty-years-later epilogue just to be cute.)
Joining Mattie in pursuit of her father’s killer (played briefly by Josh Brolin) against the backdrop of the Arkansas wilderness are the ageing and potentially alcoholic U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges as a transplanted semi-Dude, far more anachronistic on the frontier than he ever was in modern-day Los Angeles) and the inscrutable Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon, partially redeeming himself for Hereafter and Green Zone).
But the plot feels aimless: largely preserved from the original 1969 John Wayne-starring adaptation of Charles Portis’s book, it serves as little more than an excuse for our heroes to repeatedly cross paths with their rivals and enemies as allegiances shift and goals evolve. Character growth, plot twists, and revelation have all been sealed out of this particular universe.
Josh Brolin, who was cast to much greater effect in the Coens’ 2007 Oscar magnet No Country For Old Men – which also had more to say about the forms and conventions of the western genre itself – is mostly wasted in the role of Tom Chaney, particularly as Barry Pepper steals the antagonists’ scenes for himself playing outlaw Lucky Ned.
True Grit successfully builds Cogburn and La Boeuf into memorable characters even if they fall short of mythic. But the triangle they form with Mattie is articulated in passing as a sort of Lancelot-or-Galahad quandary in which Mattie is under pressure to choose the right man precisely for the job, an inchoate idea whose potential evaporates when it leads nowhere.
With cinematography by longtime Coen collaborator Roger Deakins bolstering the assured performances of Bridges, Damon, and newcomer Steinfeld (who is nothing short of a delight in this picture even though it doesn’t exercise much of her range), to say nothing of the competence of the brother-directors themselves, True Grit is far from a failure.
But knowing the Coens and their creative capabilities, it is hard not to see such essentially conventional output as a misstep. It only remains to be seen what they will cook up next.