Old Yorker

Joel and Ethan Coen (2010)

I don’t like Westerns or the Coen brothers but this is a pretty good film.  After watching the 1969 version the previous evening, I was naturally comparing the two versions as I watched this one.  For a while, the Coens’ smooth craftsmanship seemed to make for a less remarkable movie than Henry Hathaway’s, even though – if you compare the films in terms of their individual components – the new one is superior on nearly every count.   Yet the Coens’ True Grit builds, gradually but strongly, and the interactions among the three principals Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), Mattie Ford (Hailee Steinfeld) and LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) are increasingly convincing.   By the end, the Coens have created a grimly coherent portrait of time and place.  Their previous attempt at a remake, The Ladykillers (2004) (which I’ve not seen), was among their least well-received movies; so were what might be classed as genre remakes – the noir The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), the romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty (2003).  Here their choice is much shrewder.  The first True Grit could be termed a ‘classic’ only in the sense that it’s well known and much loved: it’s not widely regarded as anything approaching a great picture.  The Coens evidently saw an opportunity to make the film of the Charles Portis novel that had been foregone – or would have been too controversial – in the late sixties (although large chunks of identical dialogue feature in both versions).  They’ve also found a means of revisiting, but a hundred years earlier, the spiritual, if not the precise geographical, territory of No Country for Old Men (2007).

The earlier movie was the work of relatively conservative and conventional temperaments.  The Coens, notorious for their jocose absurdism, have made a film in which, beside the original True Grit, religion is more powerful; violent death – at the hands of the law or of the lawless – is more affecting; and the relationships between the main characters, thanks to the quality of the acting, are more meaningful.  There’s more scolding encouragement to abide by the good book from the Coens’ Mattie Ross and the film’s virtual theme song is an arrangement, by Carter Burwell (who also did the original music), of ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’.  (For viewers familiar with The Night of the Hunter that choice of song supplies a strongly subversive undertone.)  Mattie is shocked by the deaths of Quincy and Moon; and there’s a fine sequence when she and Rooster come upon a man hanging high on the branch of a tree, and he gets her to climb up and cut the body down so they can be sure it’s not Mattie’s father’s killer, Tom Chaney.  This body, when it comes to earth, is a gruesomely convincing corpse.  So is the still clothed skeleton at the bottom of the cave Mattie falls down into, and where she gets bitten by a venomous snake.  As Rooster carries her away on horseback, they pass through a trail of dead things, men and horses, soon to be augmented by Mattie’s mount, Little Blackie, whose end is more extended, realistic and upsetting than in the original film.  It’s right that it’s the death of an animal that causes the precociously, determinedly self-disciplined Mattie to break down emotionally.  When Rooster Cogburn is struggling desperately to get the poisoned girl to some kind of medical help, his heavy breathing is not just because he’s ‘old and fat’ but shows how much she’s come to matter to him.

None of this means that the Coens have forsaken their absurdist principles – the relentless, meaningless passage of life into death dwarfs the people’s attempts to impose moral order on their world as much as the landscape overpowers them physically.  But True Grit, though I admit it reluctantly, gives the Coens’ nihilism a streak of poignancy.   Some of what we see – like the approach of a bear in human clothes on horseback – is startling.  It’s a man (Ed Lee Corbin) wearing a bear’s head and I could have done without his humorous prattle from under it but the effect of this Coenism hardly detracts from the surreal power of the initial image.  The fluency of the film-making is in a different class from that of the first True Grit; the barren, dusty landscape and the people in it are made to look both real and metaphorical.  The repeated falls of light snow increase both the beauty and the hopelessness of the terrain.  As usual in a Coens film, Roger Deakins is the DoP, Jess Gonchor the production designer, Mary Zophres the costumer and Roderick Jaynes (alias Joel and Ethan Coen) the editor.

Jeff Bridges is cavalier about audibility nowadays – at least he seems to regard speaking lines that you can hear as only a subsidiary part of characterisation – although I think I picked up more of them here than I did in Crazy Heart.  But, as a piece of physical acting, his performance is masterly, and comically inventive too.  Bridges conveys an immensely strong sense of Rooster’s having done many times before jobs like the one he’s contracted by Mattie to do:  his Rooster is both in his element and wearily antipathetic towards his way of life and place of work.   (This jadedness also comes across in the early courtroom sequence – longer here than in the Hathaway film, which also gives us a sense of how Rooster Cogburn, though he’s an agent of the law, is mistrusted and despised by the authorities.)   Matt Damon creates a wittily lucid portrait of LaBoeuf, capturing the Texas Ranger’s combination of prissiness and decency.  Whenever LaBoeuf tries to assert his superiority, he always ends up looking embarrassed (but, unlike in the earlier film, he at least escapes with his life).  I was disappointed by Josh Brolin’s Chaney, although he does get over some sense of a personality that’s lethally volatile.  The minor criminals are perhaps the only department in which the actors here aren’t as strong as their precursors in the roles – particularly in the case of ‘Lucky’ Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper vs Robert Duvall).  Domhnall Gleeson (Moon) loses on points, but decisively so, to Dennis Hopper.  On the other hand, Paul Rae as Quincy is better than Jeremy Slate in the Hathaway film.    Hailee Steinfeld, as Mattie, is a much more emotionally protean presence than Kim Darby:  fourteen-year-old Steinfeld doesn’t only look the right age – her face suggests different ages in different situations.  She’s not afraid to make Mattie’s bossy articulacy irritating.  She’s credible in how she gradually, subtly comes to defer to Rooster once they’ve left town and are, for Mattie, in terra incognita.

One of the best things about Kim Darby’s portrait of Mattie was that she suggested a spinster-in-the-making; and the Coens reintroduce the narrative of the novel, which is being told by the elderly, unmarried woman Mattie turned into.  Elizabeth Marvel’s voiceover is nothing special but she makes a powerful impression (not least because this Mattie loses an arm as a result of the snake bite) when she appears in the closing stages.   And when she disappears:  instead of John Wayne galloping vigorously away, childless Mattie recedes into the distance after visiting the family plot where, thanks to her, Rooster Cogburn is also now buried.  Mattie’s observation that time catches up with us all wins no prizes for originality and it’s predictable that the Coens, rather than have a protagonist ride off into the sunset, present a dark-clad, maimed figure walking firmly in the direction of a bleak horizon and dying light.  But it looks very good.

12 February 2011

Henry Hathaway (1969)

We watched it on television last night as prep for the Coens’ remake, which we’re seeing today. The film is 128 minutes and, because it’s just one damned thing after another, seems longer, but it’s also a strange mixture of elements.  The golden and verdant landscapes, photographed by Lucien Ballard, are beautiful but where is the action meant to be taking place?  Rooster Cogburn – the one-eyed US marshal hired by young Mattie Ross to track down Tom Chaney, the hired hand who killed her father – has as a sidekick a Texas ranger called La Boeuf and makes jokes about ‘Texicans’.  There are references to Indian Territory, though no sign of Indians, and to Little Rock, but the breathtaking mountain backdrops don’t make you think of Arkansas.  Sally had the atlas out before the end but the mystery was solved by Wikipedia, which says the film, in spite of what the script tells us, was mostly shot in Colorado.  The principals – the adolescent Mattie as much as the grizzled veteran Rooster – react to the many shootings that occur largely with equanimity.  (There’s just one bit when Mattie weeps privately, at the loss of her beloved father.)  This is oddly effective in suggesting a time (the 1880s) and place inured to mayhem though I’m not sure it’s what Henry Hathaway intended with this adaptation (by Marguerite Roberts) of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel.  Hathaway seems more interested in making things wholesome, with Kim Darby as Mattie and Glen Campbell as La Boeuf, and baddies lacking in menace.  The autumnal lustre of the visuals and the aging John Wayne in his Oscar-winning (sic) turn as Rooster both give the piece a vaguely elegiac quality.   Elmer Bernstein’s enjoyable music, as well as being conventionally effective, includes conscious echoes of other western scores (The Big Country, The Magnificent Seven, probably others that I didn’t pick up).

The eye patch helps John Wayne.  First, it halves the challenge of changing expression.  Second, it does – on a small scale – what concealing make-up or a full-face mask has often done for actors:  something to hide behind and free you.  In Wayne’s case, there isn’t much acting talent to be released as a result of this liberation.  What I think happens, though, is that it sharpens his awareness that he’s playing a character, even if he’s unable to create one much different from himself.  The effect of John Wayne pretending to be John Wayne is not only virtual self-parody – it also results in a performance more vivid than usual.  That’s damning with faint praise and Wayne is still often dreary.  But there’s a kinship between Rooster Cogburn and Wayne as survivors:  I can understand that meant a lot to many people, at a time when the Western was assumed to be on its last legs, even though it means little to me.  With the cast around Wayne being killed off in the course the film, the quality of survival grows stronger.    Sally admired how easily he sat on a horse, although he’d had plenty of practice by this late stage in his career.

As fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, twenty-one-year-old Kim Darby is competent, conscientious and likeable but there’s little depth and less surprise in what she does.  (Wikipedia claims that Mia Farrow had been going to play the role, which would have been an interesting follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby.)  In the early scenes, before she put on trousers instead of a skirt, I liked Darby’s rather laboured movement:  she made Mattie seem prematurely middle-aged.  There are plenty of exchanges between her and Rooster which, if Darby had been convincing as a young teenager, would have come over as a lot more corny.  In that respect, her maturity is a relief but it also robs the story of a good deal of its distinctiveness.  Perhaps it’s remarkable enough that a female of any kind in this society behaves with Mattie’s self-possessed, dauntless determination but it feels wrong that, in her early dealings with officialdom after her father’s murder, no one expresses surprise at her youth.  In spite of the rigours of her journey with Rooster and La Boeuf, Mattie continues to look surprisingly clean and tidy and that goes well with Kim Darby’s scrubbed neatness.  Unlike anyone else in the film, Mattie speaks without contractions and Darby handles the lines skilfully.   (I assumed this was a sign of Mattie’s school education and everyone else’s lack of it.)

If it’s not surprising, in retrospect anyway, that Kim Darby’s career didn’t take off on the back of True Grit, it would have been astonishing if Glen Campbell had gone on to regular acting work.  (According to Wikipedia, John Wayne ‘hand picked’ Campbell for his role in the film – and there are other instances which make you think the casting was planned to make the star look relatively good.)  In fact, Campbell earns his fee before the opening titles are over with his fine singing of the appealing title song (music by Elmer Bernstein, words by Don Black).  He’s not bad in La Boeuf’s early scenes in the boarding house with Mattie but Campbell’s in trouble as soon as the action moves to the great outdoors.  He’s not uninteresting to look at, thanks to his seeming a weird cross between two memorable screen characters of the period, Michael J Pollard’s C W Moss in Bonnie and Clyde and Jon Voight’s Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy.  But Campbell is stiffly self-conscious and doesn’t know how to use his body; the confidence seems to drain out of him and, by the closing stages, the performance has sunk to the level of ones like Samantha Eggar’s in Doctor Dolittle:  you lose any sense of what the character was meant to be.  The style and standard of most of the acting mean that, when someone genuinely talented appears – Robert Duvall (as the gang leader, ‘Lucky’ Ned Pepper, an old adversary of Rooster) or Dennis Hopper (as a horse thief called Moon) – it throws the film briefly out of joint.  Hopper is more dynamic in his death throes than any of the people who go on living.  (It’s an amusing historical detail that True Grit appeared in the same year as Easy Rider – and Midnight Cowboy.)  Jeff Corey is a surprisingly middle-aged Tom Chaney.  The horses work very hard and there’s a good ginger cat that shares Rooster’s lodgings although its regular miaows sound a bit to order.

11 February 2011