Just One More Thing . . .

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.

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.

So Many Movies . . .

The recent death of Blake Edwards reminded me once more—as if I needed reminding—that there is so much cinema out there I've yet to experience.  While Edwards's stylistic flair and comedic gifts (in the service of a rather grim outlook on life) earned him a lofty spot in the directorial rankings Andrew Sarris assembled for his seminal 1968 book, The American Cinema—specifically, Sarris put him among the directors who fell just short of "Pantheon" status, the category he labeled "The Far Side of Paradise"—I find, alas, that my own sampling of Edwards's output remains just that, a sampling. I've seen 10, Victor/Victoria, S.O.B., at least one of the Pink Panther farces (A Shot in the Dark, I think), and maybe a couple of others. I've not seen Breakfast at Tiffany's, Days of Wine and Roses, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, etc., etc.

And as I flip through Sarris's book for perhaps the five hundredth time, I'm struck by the many other worthy directors whose films have largely escaped my eyes: Frank Borzage, Erich von Stroheim, Gregory La Cava, Leo McCarey, even most of Cukor, Capra, and Minnelli, for heaven's sake. I could go on and on, and I'm only speaking here of American directors whose works mostly predate the mid-twentieth century. When Film Comment hits my mailbox every two months, or whenever I peruse some film website or other, I read of an important new talent from Europe, Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East that I really ought to check out. When will I ever get to them all? And I say this as someone who's seen thousands of movies!

Netflix has been a great aid in remedying gaps in my film-watching experience, but I often think I could see three movies a day for the rest of my life and never feel that I've earned the right to call myself a proper cineast. And let's not get started on the books I haven't read . . .