Joel and Ethan Coen are probably tired of the question, but you can’t not ask it: Why make a film of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel True Grit when it already was a movie — a good one — with a definitive, Oscar-winning performance by John Wayne as one-eyed U.S. Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn? After all, it’s not like the brothers need the work.
On the basis of the new film, I’d say the Coens made their own True Grit because their voice and sensibility owe something to Portis. Their dialogue, like his, is a blend of the baroque and the deadpan, their vision nihilistic with a hint of farce.
The Coens signal their approach to True Grit by replacing the Duke with the Dude — Jeff Bridges, late of their film The Big Lebowski — and by introducing him, or at least his voice, from an outhouse. He sits inside and churlishly refuses to engage with Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a 14-year-old girl who seeks a man with “true grit” to help her capture the drunken handyman who gunned down her father.
Rooster is a mean drunk who once rode with William Quantrill, the man who led the infamous Lawrence, Kan., massacre of 1863. Bridges plays up the debauchery: He’s half-hidden behind an unruly beard and mustache, and his nose and cheeks are dotted with the alcoholic’s classic burst blood vessels. He’s lowered his voice so that it seems to slosh around in a pool of whiskey and phlegm; even with his deliberate, quasi-biblical diction, maybe half his words are intelligible.
As you might infer from all that drunken, surly verbiage, the movie takes its sweet time to get going. But as soon as Mattie, Rooster and a Texas Ranger played by Matt Damon head off for Oklahoma’s Indian Country, the movie finds its peculiar rhythm. Damon is a wonderful foil for Bridges, with his ostentatious jangling spurs and fringed jacket. He’s a macho preener, but he lives by a gentleman’s code, and he’s dogged.
