It seems like everyone wants to forget about the Henry Hathaway film, the original True Grit. The new Coen Brothers’ film cringes at the idea of being called a re-make. The directors have said themselves that they wanted to go back to the novel pretending that the original film never existed. Jeff Bridges claims that the Charles Portis book reads like a Coen Brothers’ script anyway. The Coens have been criticized for making clever post-modern films that don’t say a great deal about anything. But their latest film is doing something important, albeit something very different to the film released in 1969.
It’s impossible for the film to start completely from scratch with a clean slate. The first film isn’t just a generic Western: it’s a John Wayne movie, and it must have been hard to leave his personality behind. It’s a story that must have struck a chord with Wayne. He liked the novel so much that he lobbied for himself to play the drunken marshall. It’s as much about Wayne as anything else and played around a lot with his considerable age. In a sense comparable to what the 2006 film Rocky Balboa was to Sylvester Stallone, this was a reprise of Wayne’s past roles. John Wayne’s decision to take on four men at once has Maddie Ross whooping: ‘No Grit Mr. Cogburn? Not much!’. For a finale, having been berated by Maddie ‘You’re too old and fat to be jumping horses’, he proves her and the audience wrong by taking a run up and jumping the picket fence. The jaunty music plays him out.
Jeff Bridges’s Cogburn is more grounded. The Coen production is deliberately nostalgic, much more of a period piece and Bridges totally inhabits this world, so much so that sometimes his authentic slurs are barely comprehensible. He gabbles to himself, his back turned away from Maddie and the audience, giving the film a realistic solidity which the fantastical adventure of the original lacks. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the Coens wanted to escape the Wayne legacy entirely. The Rooster Cogburn of the novel never wore an eye-patch and, according to Mark Kermode, the detail comes from Henry Hathaway, director of the John Wayne version.
The two interpretations of Cogburn point towards something important about the way these films work as a whole. The trailer for the 1969 film didn’t promise anything more than a frolic – ‘A slip of a girl, a pot-bellied one-eyed western marshall and a texas ranger wearing britches a size too big’; japes, larks and ‘irreverent humor’ with a tomboy, a drunk and a bully. The original hid its complexities behind a comic front; John Wayne played a snoring, drunken lout whilst himself being, next to Bogart, one of the biggest smokers in Hollywood and dying of lung-cancer. Meanwhile, the film’s morality is rarely black and white, even if the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ cliché might have led us to believe otherwise. During the course of the film, John Wayne takes down several teenage boys, steals a horse and cart from three strangers and kills a pony. The courtroom scene at the opening is a fantastic conceit as we are in fact seeing the trial not only of Rooster Cogburn but also of John Wayne himself. The new trailer for the Coen brothers’ film, on the other hand, promises to deliver justice more simply: ‘Retribution’ proclaims the last word of the trailer. The nostalgia is for a more simple world in which the success of the chase is all.
In the last five minutes of the new True Grit we witness the passing of a whole way of life and realize what the whole film has been working towards. The Westerns of the ‘60s, even the thoughtful ones, had bright blue skies and verdant landscapes. The Coen’s True Grit has a look of its own, all snow, ice and mountain desert; free from John Wayne, even the landscape becomes part of a swan-song for the Western genre itself.
The Coens execute a master-class in cinematography, humour, and performance. The film’s energy and violence gives the ageing genre of the Western a youthful sheen and mirrors what Hathaway succeeded in with Wayne: silencing the doubters and proving the audience wrong. They have this Western take a run-up and jump the picket fence one last time.
