Watching the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit brings to mind a question I think a lot of filmgoers have been wrestling with lately: what is the point of a remake? The remake is becoming a major part of cinema, and it could be argued it is the laziest form of film making - even moreso than sequels. There seems to be two kinds of remakes: one is the retelling of a story for an audience that may not have seen the original. The other is a reinterpretation of a film, filtering it completely through a new director's point of view. There is probably more nuance than those two options, but largely most remakes fall into one of the two camps. The Coen Brothers would seem like the ideal candidates for the second category, but True Grit never seems to have much in common with their darkly ironic worldview to begin with (The Searchers always felt like it would make more sense for them). And indeed, True Grit lacks a lot of what one might expect from the Coens, ultimately feeling more like a retelling of the original John Wayne version than anything else.So then, I ask, why? Why spend a year of your life remaking a fairly well known, Oscar winning Western, and not update the story in any real way? What is this film meant to offer us? The answer seems to lay with two things: the acting and the technical components. If nothing else, the Coens have so finely tuned their craft, that they make some of the most fully realized films each year. From sound to visuals to editing, they seem incapable of making a technically deficient movie, and True Grit is no exception. With each gunshot that rings out, you will jump in your seat. Every set looks so real you would assume they found authentic locations to shoot in. The costumes run circles around those in the original. The score, inspired by hymns from the era, is enchanting and memorable. In pretty much every technical aspect, this is the superior film to the 1969 original. But is that enough?
The acting, with apologies to Mr. Wayne, is unanimously better here. Rooster Cogburn, as portrayed by John Wayne, was little more than an extension of the Duke's persona. He played a type, and this character was that type to a T. Jeff Bridges, on the other hand, has created a wholly original character. Mumbling, foolish, aggressive, bitter - Bridges fills what could have been a stock hero with so much nuance and energy that you can't help but be entertained by him. And while he is very good, even better is newcomer Hailee Steinfeld as young Mattie Ross, the girl who hires Cogburn to avenge her father's murder. She takes the delightfully archaic and wordy dialog and runs with it effortlessly, making you forget she is acting at all. As head strong as Mattie is, Steinfeld never lets you forget than you are watching a young grieving girl, and she lets that aspect shine through at just the right moments. It is one of the best performances of the year.
And yet, for all this, the film still suffers from its inability to shake the original, to be something new. The pacing often feels very off, dragging right when it should be speeding up. There is a long sequence early on in which Cogbrun is on trial for murder. While this is meant to serve as our introduction to just who Cogburn is, it ends up stopping the momentum of the movie and tells us little that we wouldn't know just from watching how this man behaves around others. And the climax of the movie seems far more rushed than in the original. While we are never meant to really know Tom Chaney, Ned Pepper, or the other villains of the film, it feels like they get even less screentime here than in the original, making the climax feel more perfunctory than it should. And speaking of endings, they seem to be the most divisive aspect of any Coen Brothers movie. Here will be no exception, but for the opposite reason of A Simple Man or No Country: it doesn't know when to end. We get a flash forward on top of another flash forward, telling us every last detail we could ever want to know, when a little more ambiguity might have served the story better.
If you have never seen the original True Grit, this may well be a very good movie. I have seen the 1969 version, so it becomes more difficult for me to appreciate this version. The things that stand out here really stand out, but the things that fail are pretty glaring. In the end, I cannot judge this movie as if I hadn't seen the Wayne version, any more than a newcomer could judge this in the context of the original. Which again begs the question, why remake this film? As much as I liked the aspects I liked, I probably would have enjoyed them even more in the context of an original story. It often felt like the Coens were spinning their wheels instead of trying to be innovative. This movie can be fun at times, but it never really rises above that, and occasionally dips below it.
