True Grit

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.

Iron Man

After a brief spring hiatus it's time for me to get back into the swing of things with the summer movie season, and what better way to kick things off than with Iron Man?

1997's Batman & Robin was a movie so singularly bad it ended a franchise, a number of careers, and nearly destroyed the comic book movie as a genre. It also took a toll on me, at the time just a young boy who loved movies and superheroes. It was a movie going experience that has stayed with me forever, a scar that won't quite go away. I bear that scar every time I go to see a superhero movie, making it very hard to unabashedly love them. At the first sign of whimsy or cuteness I run for the hills. I hate every Spider-Man movie, can't stand the Fantastic 4 series, and barely tolerate the first and third X-Men. Indeed, the only superhero movie I have loved with all my heart since 1997 is Batman Begins, perhaps because it was made specifically to be the antithesis of Schumacher's abomination. It is with that baggage that I approached Iron Man, a movie I couldn't quite get behind, but saw signs of great things to come within.

Iron Man is not exactly one of the top tier superheroes. That holy trinity seems to be Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman - three icons that everyone know. I went into this film knowing very little about the Iron Man character, his mythos, or rogues gallery. In a way that seems to work to the film's benefit. Usually you know exactly what you're getting from a film about the Holy Trinity because they've carved out such specific places in our culture that they can't really deviate. Iron Man has no such place in our society, so the film is free to do things we've not yet seen in a superhero movie, playing with the ideas of keeping your identity a secret, who a superhero should protect, and how it should be done.

Robert Downey Jr is a great choice to play a wisecracking, womanizing, alcoholic billionaire weapons manufacturer. While he seems a bit reigned in compared to some of his greatest performances, his charm and charisma is the single best aspect of the film. I'd be surprised if he doesn't get a similar popularity boost to the one Johnny Depp did after Pirates. To take a character who is so self-centered and egotistical and make you truly believe that he would want to save the world by film's end is no easy feat, but Downey sold me. The rest of the cast is well chosen, if given little to do. Terrence Howard is largely wasted as the best friend who clearly is there to set up his role in the sequel. Gwyneth Paltrow is wonderfully understated for most of the film, but she becomes a bit whiny towards the end of the film. And the great Jeff Bridges is an inspired choice for the villain - pity he is almost nonexistent for most of the run time. If Downey sold me on his character arc, Bridges was the exact opposite. He becomes the villain almost out of the film's necessity, not out of a clear path for his character. It felt like something that should have been developed throughout the film and then payed off in a sequel. The cast all work well together, though, and any problems they run into is a result of the script and not their acting.

Indeed, the script is the film's only true weakness, lacking any real direction. The first third of the film is great, as it sets up how Tony Stark is captured by terrorists using the very weapons he has been manufacturing. He sees what he has been doing to the world and decides to escape and set right what he'd done wrong. After that, though, it goes nowhere. He spends a great deal of time just working in his lab creating the suit we've all become familiar with. The final twenty minutes finally pick back up as a villain rises to challenge him. Those who were bored by the lack of Batman in the first hour of Batman Begins will be truly asleep here, as Iron Man is probably on screen for less than a fourth of the 2 hour run time.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this film is that Iron Man is not a hero out to save a city, like Batman or Spider-Man (or even Superman oftentimes). Instead, he has made it his mission to save the world. If given this incredible suit, would you go around town stopping thieves and muggers, or would you fly around the globe stopping terrorism? It makes for a more dynamic character, and raises interesting moral questions (should some American in a suit of armor be allowed to police the world?). It's not developed too deeply in this film, but it's clear that this is the direction the sequels will be going in.

Iron Man feels like a movie that was made simply to build up to the inevitably better sequel. It puts all the pieces in place and then says (figuratively) "To be continued." It's a film of individual great elements, but elements which are not allowed to all gel together. Perhaps I will never really be able to love a movie like this again, but I can see a lot to appreciate, and I think that Iron Man as a franchise has a great future, even if the inaugural installment wasn't perfect.