Untrue Grit
The original True Grit had flaws–as does this new version. Fans will note that the Coen brothers have moved the eye-patch from Wayne’s left eye to Bridges’ right.
At issue in the novel and the original are courage and heroism, virtues that contemporary audiences distrust because those virtues require certainty, and post-modernists sensibilities would have us believe that the only certainty is that there is no certainty. This passes for sophistication among people who also equate criticism with creativity, impresses people who do no critical thinking at all, and have never had the courage or desire to be genuinely creative because to do so requires self-examination of core values.
You cannot create art and hope it will have lasting worth if you believe all principles have equivalent value and that yours will change with time, place, and how much coffee you’ve had.
Wayne was not a great actor; he was a great icon, employed by Howard Hawks and John Ford in movies that defined the American mythos immediately before and after WWII. The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence are complex stories; Sands of Iwo Jima is a very great, complex, war movie, not propaganda. Sure, in his long career Wayne made more than a few stinkers–what star does not? A guys gotta eat.
Living in a post-modernist culture of cynicism, the Coen’s do not know what to do with the idea of “heroism.” What the hell do they think “grit” means? Bridges plays the lead very well, but Wayne played the hero as an archetype and was probably the only actor who could do that, not out of any amazing talent, but because of his long legacy as a journeyman western hero and the connection in the audience’s mind that Wayne=Americanism. Wayne’s personal politics were Reagan-Right, but skepticism about his performance that won an Oscar because of his personal politics is like rejecting Ezra Pound’s poetry because he was a fascist, somewhat off point. He won the Academy Award for a lifetime of roles–everyone knew that. So what?
The Coen version ends with a tired contemporary cliché of an older person who recalls the action for us–awkwardly imposed on the film as no such character is hinted at in the opening. Lacking a vision of courage and moral certainty, the Coens simply had no ending, and fell back to the faux memoir, a narrative that roots all story-telling in individual perspective and makes all “facts” really simply “recollections.” Like Titanic. Yes, well, no doubt the two outlaws Mattie interviews at the end of the Coens’ version were bad men in their time–but see? here they are in a western show with Rooster Cogburn. There is no such thing as good and evil: it’s only thinking that makes it so. Everyone gets old and dies; nothing matters.
But the original ends with a freeze frame of Wayne: “Well, come see a fat old man sometime!” as his horse leaps a fence, the camera shooting from the ground up, making Wayne larger than life–which he was.
So the Coens give us a sigh that means “paths of glory lead but to the grave,” a pretty limp emotional point, but in the original we see the larger-than-life image of a dissolute, ageing, principled loner whose courage and grit in a lawless territory who comes to respect a 14-year-old girl he calls “little sister” because she too has grit. Pointedly, the Coen brothers omit the dialogue by Wayne, “She reminds me of me,” uttered when Mattie and her horse swim the river into Choctaw territory, fearlessly leaving law and her lawyer behind. The famous “jousting” scene in both films is observed by Mattie from a height and distance, but in the original Mattie excitedly says, “True grit? I’ll say!” but in the Coen brothers version she may as well be in the cheap seats at an NBA game. They’ve edited out courage.
When a culture cannot identify evil and questions its own motives, it can no longer identify its enemies.
Yes, there is evil in the world.
Yes, not all claims to virtue are of equivalent value.
Yes, this is what the original westerns taught us—which is why they have gone out of style.
