Man on Film: True Grit

Since this blog has made the full-on switch to being a pop culture blog, I have written about every newly released film that I have gone to theatrically but two.  Those two outliers have been A Serious Man and Burn After Reading. 

With Burn After Reading, I think the primary reason that I never did a reaction piece was that I was largely disappointed but was worried that I would later come around on the film as I did with earlier Coen Brothers films such as O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowski.  Having been initially somewhat underwhelmed by Lebowski, I would now contend that it is one of the funniest movies ever.

With A Serious Man, I had begun to write an entry, but I had this weird idea about how the movie had a weird anti-technology/trappings-of-modern-society angle it was working on that I was relatively unsure about* and didn't want to finish until I had seen it a second time.  That second viewing never happened.  Neither did the blog entry.

*I once convinced myself that Radiohead's Hail to the Thief was almost entirely an anti-Bush album, a reading that I seemed to be entirely alone on when I talked this over with friends.  I definitely wanted to be sure on the A Serious Man thoughts, and the theory was just a kernel.

I went to True Grit for the first time last Thursday, but I was tired from not having slept much for the two nights prior to going and ended up dozing off for what I figured was about five minutes.  After going to it again, it would seem more like I missed about two minutes the first time.  That I had to see it a second time (or at least felt obligated to) does not make me upset at all.

True Grit is outstanding. 

While the Coen Brothers post-The Man Who Wasn't There output has been hit-or-miss, True Grit is most definitely a hit.  Joel and Ethan Coen have churned out another highly stylized script with pitch-perfect dialogue that rivals their best work in Fargo, Lebowski, and O Brother.  They have discovered the world in which these characters live and made it ooze from every corner of every frame in this film. 

As for those characters, they are great.  Jeff Bridges is in top form as the world weary Marshal Rooster Cogburn, grizzled, hardened, uneducated, drunk.  Not once do you think that he is the same actor who was the coach in Stick It.  Matt Damon steals every scene he is in as the loquacious and comically prideful Texas Ranger LaBoeuf.  Barry Pepper and Josh Brolin are both remarkably filthy and seem so authentically Wild West criminals that you would think a time machine had been employed to get them in the movie.

And then there is Hailee Steinfeld.  Color me shocked.  I went into this film expecting next to nothing from the lead.  I was actually leery about the movie as a whole because Mattie Ross was said to be in every scene, and having so much of a film reliant upon the performance of a child actor is not a proposition I take to without a good bit of trepidation.  Such worries were unnecessary, as she plays Mattie with such pugnacity and gumption that one can hardly tell she has appeared in only a handful of projects, most of them shorts.  If it was not for her shockingly good turn, True Grit would fall flat on its face.  Instead, we got a film that was easily one of the best of 2010.

While having neither read the book nor seen the original adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, this film is great on its own merits.  As the Coen Brothers are wont to do, they imbue this world on the fringe of civilization with nuggets of oddness that simultaneously put the Coen Brothers' stamp on the film and let the viewer know just exactly how far from society Mattie & Co. are.  The entire sequence from when they happen upon the hanged man to after they happen across the frontier dentist in the bear skin doesn't really serve to advance the narrative at all, but it is strangely vital to making the film work.  These flairs set this film apart from your standard theatrical fare, and we should all be thankful for that.

Man on Film: No Country for Old Men

After the release of two consecutive missteps, doubt began to creep into the collective psyche of filmgoers the world over as to whether they still had it. Joel and Ethan Coen have quieted any agnosticism with a resounding triumph. Owing much to their long-time collaborator, cinematographer Roger Deakins, they have taken Cormac McCarthy's minimalistic brutality and fully reimagined it for their medium.

The sparse nature of McCarthy's writing burns its way through the film; the Coens seemingly holding themselves to Hitchcock's belief that the right image will say much more than any words you can put in the mouths of the actors. This overarching lack of dialogue serves to lend even more credence to what each character does say. When the sporadic use of dialogue is coupled with the complete lack of a score, the result for the Coens is an intrinsically compelling film in which violence dances in and out of the characters' lives indiscriminately, just as it does in reality.

While the argument could certainly be made that the stars of the film could be Roger Deakins' camera and the landscape of West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and North Central Mexico, the Coens have once again managed to cast their film to perfection.

Javier Bardem channels insanity, dispassion, and determinism all at once, beholden to what one can only imagine to be some innate psychopathic code. Every choice Bardem makes is on point, including his much-talked-about hairstyle.

Tommy Lee Jones returns to the desert and scrubland of West Texas (the site of his little-seen directorial masterpiece The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) where it seems as though he's destined to turn in fantastic performances. His wizened visage emotes so much that Joel and Ethan could have probably just trained the camera on his face, not given the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell any lines of dialogue, and still gotten every point across they desired. Fortunately, that was not the case, as his character provides the film with its center, heart, and much of its humor. As he and his deputy, Wendell (Garret Dillahunt of Deadwood notoriety), investigate the spree of crimes in their jurisdiction, their banter lightens up what would otherwise be an unrelenting look at an instance of violence devouring everything in the path of a misplaced $2 million.

To ignore Josh Brolin would be an oversight, as his turn as Llewelyn Moss punctuates his triumphant return from a decade of wasting away in mostly irrelevant films. The past year has been kind to him, and in return he gives the public what some would not expect: a resolute, defiant, ordinary man whose opportunism puts him in an extraordinary--and seemingly insurmountable--situation.

As tends to be the norm with the Coen Brothers' films, the supporting roles are well cast, placing the viewer firmly in West Texas of 1980 with each secondary and tertiary fitting the bill of West Texan. Harrelson, Root, MacDonald, Corbin and the aforementioned Dillahunt all excel to name but a few.

Insofar as the story is concerned, complaints about the last quarter of the film seem flawed. The narrative of No Country for Old Men is propelled by one thing: the determination of Anton Chigurh to see his mission to the end. It is driven by his necessity to carry out all of his actions by his code. For the film to have the standard ending would have been a disservice to the singular force that tears through the movie, carving its way through the film and its characters with its jagged blade.