The Stick in the Mud of the Mississippi
True Grit (2010)
directed by Ethan and Joel Coen
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Alamo Quarry
Oddly enough, it was A Serious Man that locked in the renewed affection I had for the Coens after No Country for Old Men. On the surface, A Serious Man was full of bad dramatic stereotypes: cheating wife, pot-smoking temptress next door, cancer. But there's that folk tale at the beginning, and the tornado at the end, and although neither made sense to me, clearly something very personal had been said, and could be gleaned with time.
My problem with the Coens is that they still make genre movies from the outsider's perspective of someone who is intrigued by the rules and moralities of westerns without particularly enjoying the... atmosphere, we'll call it, of creaky saloons and far-flung spaces. The scenes in True Grit where Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon converse casually should feel informal instead of stylized. Minor characters like the man dressed in bear skins aren't funny or odd for their appearance alone (or they shouldn't be, after all these decades of mountain landscapes); better to see shy Warren Beatty in that coat than a half-wild baritone.
In other words, there's nothing in True Grit anything like Rio Bravo or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid: no down time between gunfights and campfires. The closest the Coen brothers get is in Josh Brolin's great performance as shaggy, bedraggled Tom Chaney. His looseness - emotional, physical - is the only quality of the film that doesn't feel like the final draft of a storyboard. Which is fine (those bookends are an art form all their own), except that I happen to prefer a more gangly, less rigid variety of ten-gallon tales.
directed by Ethan and Joel Coen
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Alamo Quarry
Oddly enough, it was A Serious Man that locked in the renewed affection I had for the Coens after No Country for Old Men. On the surface, A Serious Man was full of bad dramatic stereotypes: cheating wife, pot-smoking temptress next door, cancer. But there's that folk tale at the beginning, and the tornado at the end, and although neither made sense to me, clearly something very personal had been said, and could be gleaned with time.
My problem with the Coens is that they still make genre movies from the outsider's perspective of someone who is intrigued by the rules and moralities of westerns without particularly enjoying the... atmosphere, we'll call it, of creaky saloons and far-flung spaces. The scenes in True Grit where Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon converse casually should feel informal instead of stylized. Minor characters like the man dressed in bear skins aren't funny or odd for their appearance alone (or they shouldn't be, after all these decades of mountain landscapes); better to see shy Warren Beatty in that coat than a half-wild baritone.
In other words, there's nothing in True Grit anything like Rio Bravo or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid: no down time between gunfights and campfires. The closest the Coen brothers get is in Josh Brolin's great performance as shaggy, bedraggled Tom Chaney. His looseness - emotional, physical - is the only quality of the film that doesn't feel like the final draft of a storyboard. Which is fine (those bookends are an art form all their own), except that I happen to prefer a more gangly, less rigid variety of ten-gallon tales.
posted by NPK at 8:16 AM
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