Bear with me: one more posting on True Grit, and I'll move on to something else.
The academic critic Stanley Fish, a regular contributor to the opinion pages of the NY Times's online edition, devotes his latest column to the religious/philosophical undertones of True Grit, and though I don't agree with all that he says, I think he's on to something. Noting the scriptural references in both the Coen brothers' new movie and Charles Portis's original novel, and relating them to the harsh events of the narrative, Fish discusses how True Grit illustrates the "brute irrationality" of the universe and how the dispensation of God's grace can only remain a mystery to us mere mortals, what with bad things forever happening to good people and vice versa. The narrative twists, he writes, point to "two registers of existence: the worldly one in which rewards and punishment are meted out on the basis of what people visibly do; and another one, inaccessible to mortal vision, in which damnation and/or salvation are distributed, as far as we can see, randomly and even capriciously."
It surprised me that Fish makes no mention of A Serious Man (2009), the film the Coens made just prior to True Grit, since it bears considerable relevance to his argument. Even more than True Grit, in fact, A Serious Man puts religious questions front and center. A darkly comic take on the Book of Job that draws heavily on the brothers' Jewish background and their upbringing in Minnesota, it chronicles the inexplicable misfortunes—slander, familial strife, threats to health and career—that suddenly befall a mild-mannered physics professor named Larry Gopnik, who receives neither answers nor comfort from the rabbis he consults. And unlike the biblical Job, Larry faces at the end (spoiler alert) only further uncertainty. God has restored none of what he has lost, and new threats loom on the horizon: as Larry gets some ominous, if nonspecific, news from his doctor, a nearby tornado approaches his son's Hebrew school while the students mill about outside and their teacher fumbles for the key to the basement.
Fittingly enough for a Western (more spoilers follow), the parade of misfortune in True Grit is more violent. Frank Ross, a charitable man, is robbed and murdered by a no-account hired hand. His young daughter Mattie vows revenge, and several more killings and woundings ensue before she finally puts a bullet into her nemesis—only to have the firearm's recoil send her tumbling backward into a pit of rattlesnakes. She nearly dies and does lose an arm. Yet despite all she sees and endures, Mattie’s moral convictions, born of Protestant fundamentalism, never waver—even when, as Fish notes, "the world continues to provide no support for them."
The Coens, I think, are not really religious filmmakers but absurdists, who believe, to quote Webster's, "that the universe is irrational and meaningless and that the search for order brings the individual into conflict with the universe." Religion, obviously, is one way humans have tried to find that order, and in A Serious Man and True Grit the Coens are merely taking note of different ways religion has served, or failed to serve, those who use it for guidance. If the brothers, their Jewish heritage notwithstanding, subscribe to any religion, it's the religion of cinematic art. I read somewhere recently that their rigorous formalism—their meticulous compositions, shot selections, and editing—might be their way of making sense of, or at least resisting, the disorder of the universe. Sounds right to me.
A closing note: Clearly, my previous posts about the language of True Grit being its primary attraction to the Coens didn't go far enough. There is obviously something else at work, something in Charles Portis's wry depiction of his Calvinist heroine—the author was raised a Presbyterian in small-town Arkansas and doubtless knew many a stern elder who served as a model for Mattie Ross—that clicked with those two talented lads from a very different background. Therein, perhaps, lies a subject for further research.
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