The Coens and True Grit (Again)

Several postings ago, back in early April, I speculated that the uniquely stylized dialogue and descriptions of Charles Portis's 1968 novel, True Grit, were what attracted Joel and Ethan Coen to the material. The book was the basis for the popular 1969 movie that won John Wayne his only Oscar, and the Coens' announcement that they were remaking it raised a few eyebrows. Not mine. I figured that the quirky filmmaking siblings—who love an odd turn of phrase the way a tabby loves catnip—would relish the challenge of adapting the peculiar diction of Portis's characters, and indeed various news articles surrounding the movie's release this past Wednesday have suggested as much. As actor Matt Damon, who portrays a callow Texas ranger in the film, told the New York Times: "Once I read [the novel], I understood [the Coens' desire to adapt it], because the language is amazing. So much of the dialogue that is in this movie is right out of the book." 

That was also true of the '69 film directed by Henry Hathaway from a screenplay by Marguerite Roberts, but I agreed with some reviewers at the time who felt that the speech worked better on the page than on the screen. Portis's odd combination of folksiness and formality (eschewing contractions and drawing, it seemed, on every arcane frontier expression he could think of) often sounded clunky when it came out of the actors' mouths. But, recalling the Coens' aptitude for projects distinguished by similar wordplay, I hoped for a better outcome this time around.

Having now seen the new version of True Grit, I can't say the Coen brothers quite licked the language problem. As good as everyone in the cast is, I was still too often aware of actors speaking scripted lines—a disconnect resulting, I think, from the Coens' respect for the source and their decision to adapt it with a generally straight face. The gleeful absurdism of projects like Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?—films where ornate rhetoric is three-fourths of the joke—is missing here. The abundant humor in True Grit is deadpan, not ostentatious, and it serves a straightforward narrative. In the book the antiquarian language works because the tale is couched as a first-person memoir, related years after the fact, by a character of a very particular time and place, with very particular ideas about morals, manners, and the way sentences should be constructed and stories told. The people in the novel speak as they do because that is how the prim narrator, Mattie Ross, thinks they should speak or would have remembered them as speaking. In a film, unless the overall conception is broadly comedic, such lines do have a way of sounding a little, well, clunky.

And yet I still enjoyed the movie immensely, savoring particularly the Coens' solid craftsmanship (they not only wrote and directed the film but edited it under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes), the harsh winter landscapes beautifully captured by Roger Deakins's cinematography, the somber music by Carter Burwell, and, most of all, the amazingly confident performance by thirteen-year-old Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie. With scant prior acting experience, she more than holds her own with Jeff Bridges, Damon, and the other seasoned members of the cast. Coming from her the language sounds perfect. It's a travesty that the producers are touting her as a contender for the supporting actress Oscar. She carries the film.