The Coen Brothers and the Language of True Grit

I can't say I was too surprised when I heard that the Coen brothers were planning a remake of True Grit. (Production may already have begun on it, in fact.) While the Coens are no strangers to genre exercises (see Miller's Crossing) and western settings (see Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and especially No Country for Old Men), I suspect that what most attracted them to this project was the language. Charles Portis's original novel (1968) mimicked the voice of an aging, no-nonsense spinster recalling how, as a fourteen-year-old in 1870s Arkansas, she swore to avenge her father's murder, enlisted the aid of a boozy, one-eyed U.S. marshal, and rode with him into Indian Territory to accomplish the task. Befitting the narrator, the dialogue and descriptions were at once folksy and formal; here's a typical passage: "He took only a second to draw a bead and fire the powerful gun. The ball flew to its mark like a martin to his gourd and Lucky Ned Pepper fell dead in the saddle. . . . 'Hurrah!' I joyfully exclaimed. 'Hurrah for the man from Texas! Some bully shot!'"

As arch as that isolated snippet sounds, Portis's stylistic conceit actually worked quite well over the course of the novel, which became a best-seller. How well the language worked in Henry Hathaway's film version, which appeared a year later, was questionable, however. Time's critic described the problem thus: "On the printed page, the studiously naive dialogue contributed to an authentic period piece. Spoken onscreen, such lines as 'I will not bandy words with a drunkard' tend to clutter the air like gnats." (Still, the film was a hit, for which John Wayne, playing the marshal, won his only Academy Award.)

Stylized speech, often some bent version of regional vernacular, has always been a favorite implement in the Coen brothers' toolkit—from the "you betchas" of Fargo to George Clooney's outlandish patter in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Given that history, they'll probably have great fun adapting Portis's peculiar rhythms and constructions, and I'm hoping it'll all work better this time around. Reviewing the original film in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris observed that Hathaway directed his actors "somewhat against the consciously literary dialogue" of the novel. The Coens, on the other hand, are likely to have their cast reveling in it.