Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Now the Coen Brothers are all right with me.
So y’all know I wasn’t down with A Serious Man, right? But being the forgiving sort, I took myself to see True Grit today. I read the Charles Portis novel this last summer and loved it. Would the Coen Brothers give it their No Country For Old Men (i.e., slavishly faithful) treatment? I hoped so.
Happy to report that they did, indeed. While they felt it necessary to add at least one scenelet to punch up the drama (a bit between Mattie and LaBouef, wherein she tells the Texas Ranger that she “threw in with the wrong man”), they followed Portis’s novel quite well, cribbing whole swaths of dialog. One slight misstep, in my opinion: they include the novel’s coda (which the John Wayne version, to my recollection, dropped) but Mattie’s voice-over was lacking. If ever the Coens should have taken something whole from the novel, it was Mattie’s dismissal of Cole Younger’s and Frank James’s traveling road show. This was Mattie’s (and Portis’s) way of saying goodbye to the myth of the Old West, and it would have been a nice touch to include it in the movie’s end. Instead, we get some bland comment that time goes by, or some such.
Anyway — see it. You’ll have a good time. The Coens played it more for laughs than did the John Wayne version, which is in keeping with Portis’s own sly humor. And while I think Kim Darby was the best thing by far about the old version, Hailee Steinfeld does a stunning Mattie, and I hope she gets at least a nod from the Academy for her performance. Jeff Bridges does a fine Rooster Cogburn, chewing and gargling his lines, and Matt Damon’s LaBouef crushes Tom Campbell’s performance (but any non-comatose actor could have done that).
D.
