When the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, announced that they were going to remake True Grit, it sparked all of the usual arguments about the merits and demerits of such undertakings.
The first film, released in 1969, sits in the mid-upper tier of movies made by its star, John Wayne (as well as winning him his only Oscar), and as such has achieved a kind of classic status among both Wayne fans and lovers of good westerns. There is a brand of theatergoer who maintains that there is no need to craft fresh takes on successful pictures, any more than we need new painters to dutifully re-imagine a masterwork like Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
On the other side of the debate are those who see good reasons for taking another swing at this piñata. Ever since the appearance of Wayne’s Grit, many fans of the novel — which first appeared forty-two years ago as a Saturday Evening Post serial written by Charles Portis (1933–) — have been keen to see a cinematic version that hews far closer to the plot of the book. Others see remakes as akin to a contemporary orchestra re-recording — and in the process re-interpreting — a famous piece of classical music, imbuing it with their own particular sonic signature. Seen in this light, the announcement of a new True Grit was a welcome one.
So now that the movie is out, who is right? Is the remake ill-advised, or a welcome addition to the western canon? Does the 2010 version have what it takes to make it a classic in its own right, or is it destined to be forever overshadowed by the 1969 original?
For all of the talk by the Coens of keeping their movie closer to the plot of the novel, the differences between it and the 1969 film are fairly minor — so much so that enterprising fans have cut new YouTube trailers to the 1969 version that manage to almost exactly match the trailer for the 2010 one. Both pictures rely heavily on the dialogue penned by Portis (a good thing, as the meticulously crafted and exquisitely well-toned repartee between the characters is the best part of the book, and one only need look to Peter Jackson’s painfully inept adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s equally rarefied Lord of the Rings dialogue to see what happens when one strays too far from the original work of literature).
Both also make some of the same changes to the characters. In the novel, Rooster Cogburn is about forty years of age and sports an openly disfigured and useless eye. In both films, he is played by a sixty-one-year-old actor (Wayne and Bridges were the same age when they undertook their respective attempts at the role), with each wearing an eye patch nowhere to be found in the book. (“I noticed by the lamplight,” Mattie says at one point in Portis’ original, “that his bad left eye was not completely shut. A little crescent of white showed at the bottom and glistened in the light.”) The murderer Tom Cheney, meanwhile, changes from a twenty-five-year-old in the book to a 40-50ish man in both movies.
Neither cinematic version gives the girl, Mattie Ross, the fiery bible-quoting Christianity the novel uses to help explain her perseverance and courage (the Coens make a surface stab at this, including an epigraph card that quotes the first half of Proverbs 28:1, but they still fall far short of Portis’ immersive ideal). In the book, Mattie Ross is constantly quoting scripture with expertise and passion to justify her hardheaded prejudices and decisions, often going so far as to offer extended (and, to the degree they disagree with her own beliefs, humorously acerbic) asides on the differences in the ways Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics interpret the Good Book.
This is the kind of earthy Christianity that anyone who has roamed the South is familiar with. (Once, about ten years ago while in rural Texas, I asked an old lady whether a mutual acquaintance was a Baptist or a Methodist, at which point another old woman overhearing the conversation piped up with, “My momma told me Jesus was a Methodist!”) When writer Charles Taylor wrote in the New York newspaper Newsday that Portis’ Mattie Ross, “springs from the blood and memory of the American past, her every word a hymn to the plain grace of Puritan forbearance” he was referring to that kind of deep faith, leavened by humor. Unfortunately, although the novel is filled with it, little seeped into either film beyond window dressing.
Setting aside the few non-crucial variances in plot between the two movies (things like the result of Mattie’s encounter with rattlesnakes, and the fate of the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf), it’s in other areas that the differences between the two pictures really manifest themselves. Neither can truly claim to have superior acting: I would rate Wayne, Robert Duvall, and Strother Martin in 1969 over Bridges, Barry Pepper, and Dakin Matthews from 2010, while 2010’s Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin, and Matt Damon take the prize over 1969’s Kim Darby, Jeff Corey, and Glen Campbell. The Coens are far more cinematic and talented directors than the competent but seldom inspired journeyman Henry Hathaway, but their stand-in locations for Arkansas/Oklahoma are far less memorable than the lush Colorado vistas chosen in 1969, and Elmer Bernstein’s musical score from the 1969 movie is light-years ahead of anything Carter Burwell has done here in 2010, or indeed in his entire career.
In the end, the 2010 True Grit is valuable in its own right, but doesn’t seem poised to knock the 1969 film off its pedestal as the definitive go-to version. John Wayne’s centrality to the western genre, and the film’s centrality to his reputation as an actor, guarantees that. Jeff Bridges plays a competent drunken hombre, but Wayne dug deeper into cinematic history by aping the voice and mannerisms of the great Wallace Beery (profiled in Part 2 of last year’s For Conservative Movie Lovers look at 1931’s The Champ). It’s the kind of performance that tells us that the actor is having as much fun with it as we are.
Coming full in the face of the onset of the Vietnam War and the Hippie Era (not to mention Leone’s genre-altering spaghetti westerns and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which was released a mere week after True Grit), this unabashedly entertaining and overblown character study was also a courageous thing to attempt, possessing a resonance extending well beyond the confines of the picture itself. Film critic Richard Schickel captured the full measure of Wayne’s contribution in his June 20, 1969 review of the movie in Life magazine when, talking of the story’s famous climax (capped by the salty declaration, “Fill your hand, you sonofabitch!”), he wrote:
Watching, one shouts, laughs and, unaccountably, feels tears beginning to tingle. For you feel you may be witnessing not just the beginning of a good movie’s climax but a full-throated valedictory for a tradition. Here is Wayne, the last of a great generation of western heroes, committing himself again to an action that at once affectionately parodies and joyously summarizes the hundreds — thousands — of similar moments that have preceded it in film history. And there is a tremendous sense of relief in the way he goes about it.
This “tremendous sense of relief” is extended in a final scene that doesn’t appear in either the book or in the 2010 Coen version, where Mattie Ross is allowed to offer her family’s grave plot to Rooster while he is still alive, cementing their friendship, and Rooster rides off into the sunset, jumping the fence Mattie said he was too old and fat to attempt while shouting, “Come see a fat old man sometime!” Like the young boy in Shane shouting “Come back!” (which likewise wasn’t in the book, but was only added later for the film), it’s a scene so possessive of dramatic satisfaction (what Schickel called his “tremendous sense of relief”) that we walk away from the 2010 version feeling cheated that it has been replaced by the comparatively predictable, bittersweet, and elegiac ending of the novel, the kind of dreariness we’ve long come to expect from “real art.”
Regardless of the gateway to True Grit you choose — 1968 book, 1969 film, or its 2010 cousin — it has once again proven that it is a story good enough to sustain multiple treatments. I recommend taking them on in order: Portis, Wayne, Coens.
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