Reviewing the Coen Brothers, Part 1

These days reviewers of Coen brothers films can be split into two camps. Those belonging to the first, which has by far the biggest population, are characterized by soft-treading adulation. For these reviewers the Coens can’t make genuine mistakes because they know what irony is. Most members of this camp are American, and have therefore had to take postgraduate courses in irony just to begin to understand the concept. The pass rates of these courses are not high. Accordingly, American film reviewers took years longer than non-American reviewers to realize that the Coens were, in the field of irony, child prodigies.

American reviewers in the first camp find themselves in an awkward position every time a new Coen brothers film is released. They've worked very hard to try and understand irony but they don’t understand it well enough to know when experts like the Coens are being ironic. Hence they can never be sure that the flaws they think they can detect in Coen brothers films are not intentional, ironic “flaws”, and, needless to say, are loath to say anything bad about them. Here’s a sample of this camp’s reactions to the Coens’ latest, True Grit:

"'True Grit': A ferocious heroine in a classic western" by Andrew O'Hehir (Salon.com)

"Only a wool-hatted fool would skip this movie" by Dana Stevens (Slate)

"True Grit" by Peter Travers (Rolling Stone)

"Wearing Braids, Seeking Revenge" by Manohla Dargis (New York Times)

"True Grit" by Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times)

The second and comparatively sparsely populated camp affects to be sick to the back teeth with the Coen brothers and the horses they rode in on. I say “affects” because the “critical stance” of these reviewers is in fact a calculated pose. There's no way in the world that they will ever review a Coen brothers film positively or without sarcasm. They have, to their credit, detected that something is rotten in the reviewing establishment but, to their debit, direct their polemic at film industry personalities, not the offending institution. Here are two reviews of True Grit from this camp:

"True Grit" by Rex Reed (New York Observer)

"True Grit? Humbug" by Louis Proyect (louisproyect.wordpress.com)

And so with the two camps pitched, we turn to the Coens’ latest film, a remake of the 1969 western of the same name. The most pressing question here is: Why did the Coens bother? The original starred the fat white Duke, John Wayne, as cantankerous US marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn, a role for which he won an Oscar (the less said about this the better; I will merely note in passing that Wayne beat out both Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole). The Coens cast the freshly-Oscared Jeff Bridges in the Duke’s role and old Crazy Heart acts like a man who, having taken decades to hit on an Oscar-winning role, has decided to play the same character the same way for the rest of his life.

The Coens’ True Grit was the darling of reviewers, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it an exceptional 95 (of the 208 reviews evaluated only 10 were classified as “rotten”). The more selective Metacritic gave the film a score of 80, with only one of the 40 reviews rated being described as “negative”. The film was loved by the Academy too, which conferred upon it ten nominations, including Best Picture, Achievement in Directing, and Best Actor for Bridges. The Academy’s idiocy notwithstanding, Bridges won’t be winning this year; Colin Firth’s idiot-sounding George VI will surely carry the day.

But why did the Coens remake True Grit? Both films are based on the Charles Portis novel of the same name, whose most striking aspect is its archaic diction. In this film the Coens appear to have had an irony colonic and play things as straight as the Duke's sexual persuasion. They stick faithfully to Portis’s dialogue, which sounds strangely familiar to Deadwood initiates but is nowhere near as powerful as the trope-torrents that gushed throughout the HBO series. Perhaps the Coens were not a little impressed by Deadwood, arguably the truest and grittiest, and indeed most complex incarnation of the West ever. Perhaps they saw in True Grit an opportunity to portray the West as it really was, or at least a West more like that of Portis’s novel – unlike the original film the Coens keep the novel’s framing device and the 14-year-old father-avenging Mattie’s narration. But we have been shown the West as it really was before – Unforgiven anyone? – and surprisingly for such inventive filmmakers, the Coens bring nothing to the hoedown with their True Grit.

The Coens’ adaptation of Portis’s novel is simply not compelling. Suspense is continually cut off at the pass. By keeping Mattie’s retrospective narration, we know from the second she opens her mouth that she has lived through, i.e. survived, the events she is about to describe. Having narration at the beginnings and ends of their films is a trademark of the Coens'. It works best when the narrator is a sort of quasi-supernatural figure who is both in and outside of the film at the same time: The Hudsucker Proxy and The Big Lebowski are fine examples of this. But when the Coens are striving for gritty realism, and insist on having opening and closing narrations as they do in True Grit, they forfeit all claim to true, gritty suspense. Mattie may lose her arm at the end of the film, but she was never going to lose her life. True Grit is a cautionary tale of what happens when the brothers Coen decide to become the brothers grimly serious: they make conventional movies.

With True Grit the Coens have broken no new ground and have produced a mediocre remake of a mediocre western. It is almost impossible to believe that the directors of Javier Bardem’s supreme psychopath Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men also directed the toothless caveman (Josh Brolin’s Tom Chaney) who is supposed to be the incarnation of evil in True Grit. The only character not a complete stranger to development is Matt Damon’s Texas ranger, LaBoeuf – who, like his name suggests, is a buffoon. Let’s hope that the Coens will have had their fill of gritty realism after this lumbering effort; they are much better at buffoons than they are at serious men.