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Two Great "Grits" -- for Two Different Reasons

posted 9 years ago by ecarle
13 replies | jump to latest

The first thing to note is that there is nothing wrong with a GOOD, well cast remake of an earlier film. Sequels are a different story...it is rare that "a story perfectly told" can or should be extended beyond its natural ending.

But to tell a great story AGAIN, perhaps for a new generation, perhaps in a new way, and certainly with new actors and techniques...well, it is still hard for a movie remake to be as good as its original, but not impossible.

Which "True Grit" is "better"?

Oh, I know which one for me: the first one. But for these specific reasons:

ONE: The two final scenes -- the bleak and dullish ending of Charles Portis' novel was removed and two extremely moving scenes were added to give the 1969 True Grit some poignance and uplift. The first of the two scenes finds the infamous lawyer J. Noble Daggett appearing in Rooster's small room, and we realize he's a pipsqueak and we realize that Rooster really loves Mattie like a father. The second of the two scenes finds Rooster and Mattie at the family gravesite where she wants Rooster to join her in rest...neither of them, she surmises, will marry and have families. And the movie ends with John Wayne, and Rooster is still alive.

TWO: Elmer Bernstein's score...poignant, sad and then rousing for those two final scenes, classic Western all the way to those scenes. And best of all when Rooster faces down his four adversaries and Bernstein's power chords slap in just as Rooster cocks his rifle.

THREE: John Wayne. As we shall see, Jeff Bridges was fine, but Wayne was HISTORIC. It was 1969, the year after the assasinations and riots and protests of 1968, the year of the moon landing, the year of Woodstock. And while much of the counterculture just wanted John Wayne to go away, most of them had to admit that the Tough Old Bird was going out with a bang in "True Grit." It was a fun role, and a bit of a parody role for Wayne, but he also moved everybody in the part and proved capable of some Best Actorly long monologue speeches. So they gave him the Oscar after all these years and in a year when half the country hated him(but the other half loved him.) The big surprise: True Grit was hardly Wayne's final film. He made eleven more and worked through 1976.

The Coen's 2010 True Grit doesn't have those great final two scenes...they restored the dour and dull "trailing away" ending of the book..a sequence that has neither Rooster nor LaBouef nor the Young Mattie in it. We are asked to accept an older actress who looks nothing like the young one we saw as Mattie for the whole movie; we are asked to watch a grand rousing adventure peter out to nothingness. (Should they ever remake Jaws, should they restore THAT book's dullish finale, with the shark just drowning under harpoon hits and sinking with Quint caught on the ropes and drowning with him?)

As for the music: Courtesy of their guy, Carter Burwell, The Coen's True Grit has Genuine Folksy Gospel Western music and a certain elegiac streak. When it comes time for Rooster to face the Four, Bernstein's rousing thrills are replaced by a kind of soulful thunder. But the music simply isn't as all-present and enveloping in the Coen film...their film is "too artful" to go for the heart. (Except for one stretch I'll describe below.)

The Coen's True Grit has Jeff Bridges in the great role of Rooster Cogburn. Bridges and Wayne pretty much played Rooster at the same age(early sixties) and yet Bridges' Rooster "feels" younger and sounds much older than Wayne. Bridges is great and got Oscar nominated, but there is nothing really historic about Bridges in the part. Plus, you can't always make out what he is saying in a voice as garbled and strained as he chooses to act in it.

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The Coens' True Grit is much better made than the 1969 original. Even back IN 1969, we saw Henry Hathaway's True Grit as rather a typical Hal Wallis/Hathaway cheapjack job(on the order of The Sons of Katie Elder or Five Card Stud; you could look them up) versus the "expensive and ultra-polished" look of fellow 1969 Westerns Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Peckinpah's masterly The Wild Bunch.

In 1969, what pulled True Grit above its cheap production values was the greatness of Charles Portis' story(a Mismatched Trio of Heroes set out after a Bad Man), the lushness of Bernstein's music, the beauty of the outdoor settings, the nostalgic power of John Wayne.

But it certainly got a makeover in the Coen version, clearly the more polished and professional production(credit Roger Deakins, as practically always, with making True Grit look FINE...with great blue-gray snowy days and crystalline nights.)

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The Major Flaw Forever in the 1969 True Grit was the performance of Glen Campbell as the Texan LaBouef. The book called for a rugged young Texas Ranger, we got a boyish man who read his lines as if he was in an Eighth Grade play. It is a textbook example of acting by someone who doesn't know HOW. You can see Campbell waiting for his cues, trying to remember his lines, almost invariably making the WRONG choice of how to read the lines.

Now, they were hard lines to read. Portis had written the dialogue in a kind of over-articulate contraction-free vernacular that didn't sound much like regular speech. But Wayne handled it, and Kim Darby as Mattie handled it. Campbell (in after Elvis Presley said no) could not.

Therefore, the 2010 True Grit moves well ahead of its 1969 predecessor by not only casting a capble actor as LaBouef -- Matt Damon -- but by giving the usually colorless Damon a really good version of LaBouef to play: too stuck on himself as a Texas Ranger, too much the talker, yet a young man of heart and character when the chips are down.

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The Coen's True Grit gives us an evenly matched Rooster, Mattie, and LaBouef and settles down as a character piece in which these thrown together comrades come to know each other and like each other(though sometimes they DON'T like each other) and eventually take part in the truly great climactic scenes(in BOTH versions) that involve Rooster riding One on Four in a Dogfall and Mattie falling into a terrifying snake pit.

Two adjacent scenes in the Coens' True Grit that are great: a drunken Rooster trying to shoot corn nubbins out of the sky while verbally parrying with LaBouef ("I do not accept that it was I who shot you; there were guns going off all over the place")...followed by a long stretch with sad, lonely music as the trio ride over rough and snowy terrain on their continuing quest. Is the quest futile?(Or as Bridges' Rooster writes, "fudel?")

It is not futile, as proven when Josh Brolin shows up as Mattie's prey Tom Chaney(the man who Shot Her Father) and Brolin turns in a truly eccentric performance with a twangin' drawl, a slow-witted gaze and a perpetually surprised manner. Its GREAT near-cameo work from the always-working Brolin.

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The Coens' True Grit was my favorite movie of 2010, coming right at the end of the year on Christmas Day and moving me yet AGAIN with its tale of an old gunfighter and his young spirited charge. And yet...I still like the original better(it was my second favorite of 1969, behind The Wild Bunch). The reasons I cited at the top of the post are why, and again: the better ending(with BOTH of the final scenes working together to move and uplift us), the more emotionally powerful Elmer Bernstein score, and John Wayne doing something very special near (but not at) the end of his career.

But still. The 2010 is a great adventure too. With a different TONE. Its rare you get two great movies from one great source like that.

And one more thing:

Much of the Coens' True Grit is as much a "faithful shot by shot, line by line" remake of the original as Van Sant's version of Hitchocck's Psycho. And when the two movies match up, the old one WINS:

Rooster versus the Four in the Coen remake, for instance, is missing two crucial lines from the original:

Mattie: (Watching the joust) Rooster Cogburn? No grit? Not much!

Rooster: (Pinned under his dead horse.) Dammit, Bo...first time ya gave me reason to cuss ya.

I waited for those lines in the Coen version of the joust sequence (given that all the OTHER lines in the sequence were in the Coen version, such as LaBouef's "They are too far and riding too fast")...but no. Why?

And yet: the Coens must have put at least six entirely new scenes into their True Grit, each and every one of them with a certain "flavor" that made a new movie out of the same story: the incident with the hanged man, the great scene with the Bear Man(with his great voice and his great lines), Rooster nonchalantly kicking the abusive Indian boys off the stoop for torturning a small horse, etc.

The Coen's True Grit is a "Shot for shot line for line remake" ...with six new scenes.

And that makes it great, too.

[–] franzkabuki 9 years ago

I agree with the second point - Bernstein's score was indeed an asset and no weaker than Burwell's work in the Coens's movie. However, it's difficult to imagine why would anyone be sympathetic to the 1969 picture's sappy, phoney ending while the ending of the so-called remake is a perfect illustration of the old saying "when setting out on vengeance, first dig two graves" and the whole Wild West philosophy as such. So the chick does get revenge, but at the price of losing her arm to snakebite and running her beloved hoss Blacky to death (the whole riding sequence to save her life is wonderfully, nightmarishly surreal, recalling the hallucinatory, expressionistic river scenes in The Night Of The Hunter). And the closing coda is appropriately bleak, downbeat and sad. As for John Wayne, his version of the character was much too sanitized while Bridges's Rooster's more authentically - and delightfully - dirty, crass and gruff (not to mention Bridges is a much better actor).

Plus, the Hathaway film has another very sizeable downside - the woman who plays Matty is so monumentally annoying I kept wishing someone would just bloody shoot her and rip her to little pieces; it was absolutely awful. Meanwhile, the Matty we have here is almost kinda pleasent - at least in some scenes.

"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

[–] ecarle 9 years ago

Well, I put the OP out there and it stayed unanswered till you and therefore...I value everything you say.

I do think that the original was a rather cheapjack film even for 1969...The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy put it to shame for production value alone.

But as for the rest, as noted by me the first time. I suppose the old one was a Hollywood entertainment and the new one was an art film of sorts, with the reality principle much more at play in the restoration of the original ending from the novel.

[–] ThomasMuf 9 years ago

The 1969 version is ultimately the more enjoyable, more memorable movie. The Coen Brothers's version may be marginally closer to the book (90% of the scenes are virtually the same), and is well shot and acted, it is also one grayish drag of a film, lacking in emphasis and excitement. As a "winter movie" it is nowhere near as original and witty as their memorable Fargo. It dissolves into an array of similar scenes shot exactly the same way, while the Wayne version's more overtly comedic tone and more colorful design make for a much more enjoyable ride without sacrificing the big points in Portis's novel.

On the whole, the new True Grit (including its score) is so low-key it drags badly. Its redeeming qualities are the two lead performances, especially Steinfeld's.

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] chefdonnag 9 years ago

These were fun posts to read. I loved the original movie so seeing the Cohen Brother's version was a treat. I enjoyed both movies for different reasons. Time has changed my perspective of the original but even at a young age I remember feeling embarrassed for poor Glenn Campbell. Anyway thanks for the info and opinions.

[–] Degree7 9 years ago

They are both equally good in my eyes, like you said, for two different reasons. The 2010 version is more faithful to the novel and is more of a coming of age tale than a conventional western.

The 1969 one, on the other hand, places more emphasis on John Wayne's character, and nudges Mattie Ross out of the spotlight. I guess the role was seen as a comeback for Wayne, and even in 1969 the film must have seemed simpler and more of a throwback to the bloodless, tamer innocence of the old Westerns; coming out at the height of the revisionist Western phase of Leone and Peckinpah, it is much more of an archetypal entry in the genre. When the counterculture, Vietnam, civil rights were in full swing, people wanted a good old fashioned Western that had The Duke delivering the goods. And that's exactly what it is, good wholesome fun.

[–] vicky_lc2001 (1907) 7 years ago

So Revisionist Western started in the 60s characterized by a more cynical downbeat film with an antihero as a protagonist like Clint Eastwood rather than the boy scout image of John Wayne?

[–] 9 years ago

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[–] maitch-1 8 years ago

"THREE: John Wayne. As we shall see, Jeff Bridges was fine, but Wayne was HISTORIC. It was 1969, the year after the assasinations and riots and protests of 1968, the year of the moon landing, the year of Woodstock. And while much of the counterculture just wanted John Wayne to go away, most of them had to admit that the Tough Old Bird was going out with a bang in "True Grit." It was a fun role, and a bit of a parody role for Wayne, but he also moved everybody in the part and proved capable of some Best Actorly long monologue speeches. So they gave him the Oscar after all these years and in a year when half the country hated him(but the other half loved him.) The big surprise: True Grit was hardly Wayne's final film. He made eleven more and worked through 1976

."

Thankyou for that ecarle. I saw the ad for True Grit the other day and was very excited by the thought of spending a great Saturday night watching the "Tough Old Bird".....so very well put by you.

This was fostered by seeing the equally great But Lancaster in Vengeance Valley last week. I vaguely recollect Wayne talking to a young actor about establishing a persona and sticking with it. Wayne could do it. And he kept doing it over and over and over again. Whether it be in the wild west, all sorts of wars, a big city cop or PI. He was always believable and I found it a great comfort to know what you were going to get. And when he would do an archetypal John Wayne-ism, I lapped it up. Clint Eastwood - very similar. Unforgiven, Gran Torino etc. Same for Charles Bronson. TOM CRUISE CANNOT DO IT! To me, he always plays the same, but he just can't pull it off.

if we get attacked by aliens and we are in mortal peril, and only have one man to fight for us, I pick The Duke every time. You can have your kung-fu, Bond gadgets and gizmos,all the malarkey possible. But just give me The Duke with his six shooter.

Thanks for posting ecarle

"Take away the pain, but leave the swelling."

[–] Iconoclast321 (375) 6 years ago

You know who else did that quite successfully? George Clooney.

[–] loloandpete 8 years ago

I recall on first seeing the Coen Brothers version (and being a huge Coen Brothers fan), I was disappointed. That might well have been because I only got half of what Jeff Bridges said and indeed, watching it on DVD (with subtitles) I warmed to it more. This week I read the masterly Charles Portis novel and then over the preceding two days, re-watched the Hathaway version and the Coen Brothers' version. It was really interesting to see what each adaptation took or left out from the book and for me, the ultimate result was a dead heat. What is a surprise to me is that the earlier version is much more comedic whereas the Coens' version despite their comic sensibilities, is a much more dour affair (some might say more gritty and realistic)though it also has its comic moments. I then analysed the key performances in each film:

Mattie Ross: Draw. Both brought a forthrighteousness interspersed with human moments and I couldn't separate them.

Rooster Cogburn: A lot of people say Bridges is a far better actor (and Wayne certainly couldn't play the Dude!) but Wayne is woefully underrated and made screen acting look easy. I think Wayne takes this one- his takes and comic readings allied to a real but gruff humanity make this a no contest in my opinion.

La Boeuf: Damon, easily. His timing and portrayal of the Texas ranger blows Campbell out of the water.

Tom Chaney: Brolin. Superb character playing- the voice, the whining, the slow wittedness. He makes a 3D character with very little screen time. The other Chaney made nothing of the part.

Lucky Ned Pepper: Draw. Duvall and Pepper both do an awful lot with not a great deal of screen time and both play it as a real man rather than as an obvious villain.

Colonel Stonehill: Both men do a good job but Strother Martin just has that great voice that stays in your head and his comedic exasperation is a joy.

Moon: Both Gleeson and Hopper do good work but Hopper is just somehow more watchable, more charismatic.

Quincey: The Quincey of the Hathaway version is a bit too obvious but the Coens' version delivers a more characterful, menacing Quincey.

So there you have it, 3-3 with 2 draws.In terms of story delivery, I think the Hathaway version is arguably more entertaining and delivers a better leading man performance (and Wayne really anchors the film) but the purist in me prefers the downbeat ending of the latter film with two grizzled veterans of the old west, an unchanging Mattie and the poignance of her having missed him and also the Coens cheeky little original touches such as the Bear man. I'd give both films an eight and a half but the book, a nine and a half.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

[–] Toshi51 8 years ago

I agree with most all of your comparisons but you do Jeff Corey no service as Tom Chaney. When he cries out "Everything happens to me. Now I am shot by a child!" I had to laugh. Corey was great as Chaney. So was Brolin.

[–] Iconoclast321 (375) 6 years ago

Great analysis. Just one thing: didn't like either Hailee or Kim. Hailee plays like she's got Aspbergers (a'la Keanu Reeves), and Kim played like a stereotypical, caricatured 'gosh, gee-whiz' kid of the 1960's. Other than that, both good movies.