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Ten Days Of The Coen Brothers: Day Ten Part Two

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10 years ago

March 7, 2016

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Shooting With Blanks

♦ With the release of Hail, Caesar! in the UK on 4 March, Tripwire kicks off a look at all of the Coen Brothers films released to date. Today we took a look at their fourteenth film A Serious Man (2009) and now our editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at their fifteenth effort True Grit (2010).

True Grit

Director: Joel Coen

Stars: Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Hailee Steinfeld

One year after the exhaustively challenging A Serious Man, the Coens opted to blindside their audience yet again, this time with the second remake of their cinematic career. True Grit, based on the book by Charles Portis and originally brought to the screen with John Wayne back in 1969, is a straight western, devoid of any of the off-kilter flourishes that the Coens have made their trademark since Raising Arizona. In many ways this is probably the most conventional, if not anonymous film they ever made – and despite this being their first western project, it’s the Coens merely marking time, unwilling to expand on the genre.

Haillee Steinfeld is Mattie Ross, a precocious teenager who retains grizzled, irascible US Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track down the murderer of her father. Matt Damon plays Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who is drawn into the group because he feels that Cogburn isn’t up for the job. True Grit boasts some exquisite cinematography, with Bridges comfortably inhabiting the role of Marshal Cogburn, but the Coens could lend visual flair and period authenticity to such a movie in their sleep. However, watching Bridges mumble his way through an hour and a half becomes old very quickly and only Damon as the pompous yet heroic ranger really manages to lift it above the perfunctory. Coens regular Josh Brolin plays Tom Cheney, the man who killed Mattie’s father, and he is reliably good as the archetypal gnarled, feral Old West villain. But there is no subversion, with nothing that steps outside the tropes that feature in every classic western. Just like Burn After Reading, True Grit feels like a stopgap Coen Brothers film, a light confection they have produced while they are developing something with more dramatic heft and imagination.

True Grit is technically a well-made film but for the Coens its a pedestrian effort, adding little to the Brothers’ canon.

JOEL MEADOWS