Giving ‘True Grit’ another shot
If ever a novel deserved to be made into a better movie, it’s True Grit.
Maybe you’re familiar with the 1969 film, in which John Wayne swags around and wears an eyepatch and outshoots a gang of roughnecks and generally Dukes it up. It was hugely popular, spawned a sequel, and was an utter disappointment — at least to me — when I watched it again a couple years back, a film that simply missed the spirit of the wonderful novel on which it was based. (Robert Ebert disagrees here, calling it a masterpiece.)
Portis, left, and what's-his-name
So I’m all jazzed about the fact that the Coen brothers are going to give True Grit, which written by Charles Portis, another shot. And that Jeff Bridges will be playing Rooster Cogburn, the Wayne role.
The Coen brothers. Jeff Bridges. And Charles Portis. For me, it’s a fanboy trifecta.
You’re surely familiar with Bridges and the Coens, but maybe not with Portis. A longtime Southern newspaperman turned novelist (and I do love a journalist turned novelist), Portis wrote a handful of books, and at least two knockouts: True Grit (1968) and my favorite, The Dog of the South (1979).
True Grit is a dry little gem, short, funny and, ultimately, poignant. The main character — a plucky young frontier girl who shrewdly outfoxes the men around her — somehow manages not to sink to the level of awfulness that the words “plucky young frontier girl who shrewdly outfoxes the men around her” might suggest.
Unfortunately, the movie was overtaken by Wayne, and where the novel toyed with the Western genre, the movie reveled in it. (My friend Daniel Jehosaphat Vice claims that the mere presence of John Wayne ruins a movie, and while I would not go that far, I wouldn’t make an argument of it.)
The novel is narrated by 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who’s trying to avenge her father’s death. Her tone is sharp, judgmental and wry, and there is a plain, deadpan quality to the sentences. Among the novel’s delights is the dialogue, as in this scene between Ross and a Texas Ranger on the trail of her father’s killer:
I said, “Why did you not catch him in Monroe, Lousiana, or Pine Bluff, Arkansas?”
“He is a crafty one.”
“I thought him slow-witted myself.”
“That was his act.”
“It was a good one.”
The Dog of the South is a looser affair all around, with a different narrative voice and broader comedy. It opens like this:
“My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I was biding my time. This was October. They had taken my car and my Texaco card and my American Express card. Dupree had also taken from the bedroom closet my good raincoat and a shotgun and perhaps a few other articles. It was just like him to pick the .410 — a boy’s first gun. I suppose he thought that it wouldn’t kick much, that it would kill or at least rip up the flesh in a satisfying way without making a lot of noise or giving much of a jolt to his sloping monkey shoulder.”
I almost always think of that “sloping monkey shoulder” when I think of Portis — the way it sneaks in at the end, the little surprise in it, the sly craft of the insult. There’s not a lot in that setup that isn’t familiar — either to readers or country music fans — but I find Portis’ voice seductive and funny (“a boy’s first gun”), a slightly less crazy cousin of Barry Hannah’s or an ancestor of Padgett Powell’s. I’d like to sit around with this guy and listen to him talk:
“I could see a tangle of gray hair in his long left ear. I wondered at what age that business started, that hair-in-the-ear business. I was getting on myself. The doctor had taken me for thirty. I felt in my ears and found nothing, but I knew the stuff would be sprouting there soon, perhaps in a matter of hours. I was gaining weight, too. In the last few months, I had begun to see my own cheeks, little pink horizons.”
In any case, there is plenty to be read about Portis online, including a wonderful Believer essay by Ed Park, the news that he is being given a lifetime achievement award, and an unofficial web site.
As for True Grit: I can think of no filmmakers better suited to the restraint needed to make this right than the Coens. Their lack of sentimentality seems perfectly suited for the material — which is not without sentiment, and which must be, it seems to me, handled perfectly to avoid the maudlin.
I’ve been a fan of theirs since I saw their first film, Blood Simple, at the old, vanished Micro Theater in Moscow, Idaho. (The Micro is an awesome story in itself; a converted old church that showed great movies for $1.50 and looked the other way when you brought in your own beer.) For a while, I thought the Coens were never going to make a bad movie, but then they hit a rough patch. (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, about 43 percent of Burn After Reading.)
Their last film, A Serious Man, had a strange effect on me: I admired it, thought it was perhaps even brilliant, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I wanted to. I simply never warmed to the film, though I really dug the way it ended and would like to see it again.
My fanboy enthusiasm for Bridges is similarly long-standing. Now that he’s everyone’s favorite and an Oscar winner, it’s not exactly unusual to sing his praises. But he’s done great work in films that no one saw (American Heart is a killer movie, just heart-wrenching and real, and he’s amazing in it) and in films that were otherwise terrible (his psycho killer in the American version of The Vanishing is awesome; the rest of the movie is not). And, perhaps less importantly, I know someone who claimed to have seen him disrobe poolside at a Montana hot springs years ago — so, what is that? Three degrees of celebrity nakedness?
Whatever it is, I can’t wait to see him as Rooster Cogburn.
True Grit is children’s film. I show it in my classroom every now and then, and the kids love it. I agree the Coen’s will improve upon it. But to appreciate the old version, watch it with your kid when he’s about 8 or 9.
My response to A Serious Man was similar to yours, but I began to enjoy it a lot more when I realized it was the Coen’s version of The Book Of Job.
Lastly, I would include The Hudsucker Proxy amongst the Coen’s duds. But it’s easy to forgive a handful of duds stacked against all the great films they’ve made. My personal favorite was Raising Arizona, until No Country For Old Men.
Lastly again, I’m really glad they didn’t choose John Goodman as Rooster Cogburn.