True Grit (2010)

When I heard that some of my favorite filmmakers, the Coen Brothers, were remaking the John Wayne classic True Grit, I was conflicted.  The Coens usually don't disappoint, but a remake just seemed like it would paint them into a corner; I usually like the Coens best when they are free to be weird or dark or whatever they happen to feel like at the time.  The first previews I saw didn't encourage me much, either; while I don't know exactly how Jeff Bridges managed to speak that incoherently, my first guess is that he had somebody else's tongue in his mouth whenever he needed to deliver dialogue.  Nevertheless, I really liked the original film, I love the Coen Brothers, and I'm a fan of Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon, so I ignored my reservations and visited my local cinema house.

For those that are unfamiliar with the plot, young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), aged fourteen, goes to the town where her recently deceased father's corpse waits for her.  Quite the little businesswoman, she sends the body back to her hometown, buys and sells some horses, and goes to the sheriff, expecting to hear news about the search for her father's killer.  The news is that the cowardly killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), has left the state and entered Indian Territory, where the law is unlikely to pursue him.  Mattie wants to see Chaney die for his crimes, and she learns that she can hire a US Marshall to act as a bounty hunter for her.  There are competent trackers, and all-around good men that are well-suited for the job, but Mattie opts for the meanest Marshall around: the surly, one-eyed drunk, Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges).

It takes quite a bit of convincing, but Mattie manages to hire Cogburn for the job.  However, no amount of convincing talk will make him follow her wishes to the letter, which include taking her with him on the manhunt and making sure that Chaney dies for killing her father and not any other crime.  After all, a Texas Ranger named La Boef (Matt Damon) wants to bring Chaney to justice in Texas, where a sizable reward would be split between him and Cogburn.  And, as for the idea of Mattie joining the manhunt in person, that's just ridiculous.  But, as many older men find out as this film progresses, Mattie Ross is not a ridiculous young woman, but someone with the will to get exactly what she wants.

This film is certainly centered around the story of Mattie Ross, but the star of the film is definitely Rooster Cogburn. Jeff Bridges does not disappoint in his role, and he manages to not echo John Wayne's Oscar-winning performance.  Bridges' take on the character can be summed up as simply "dirty."  He looks fat and greasy, he fights dirty, and he is generally a rough, unlovable person.  And that all works out great; he's believably tough, socially awkward, and genuinely funny, depending on the situation.  And Bridges' physical acting was superb; he walked the walk of an aged roughneck very well and this might be the most believable "guy with an eyepatch" role I have ever seen.  The only thing I didn't like was his bizarre mumbling, but more on that later.  Hailee Steinfeld does a great job as the calm, collected, and damn stubborn Mattie.  She manages to be stubborn, persistent, and pushy, but still likable.  This is a great role with depth for a young actress, and Steinfeld (in her feature film debut) does a fantastic job.  Matt Damon made his character less charming than Glen Campbell did in the original, and I liked his character far better because of it.  I like Damon best when he is not trying to be funny, and he comes across as earnest and occasionally exasperated here, which I thought fit this film well.  The rest of the supporting actors have limited screen time, but benefit from the Coen's tendency to make their bit role colorful.  Barry Pepper looked every part the Wild West nomad as the villainous (Ned) Pepper.  Josh Brolin played his character as fairly dim-witted and brutish, which I thought was a good choice.  Domhall Gleeson (Brendan's son and Bill Weasley in the latest Harry Potter) is stuck with a fairly whiny role as the doomed Moon, but I thought he handled the part well and didn't overact, which is high praise, considering what they do to his character.

Joel and Ethan Coen did a great job writing and directing the film.  Every single character in the film is memorable, many are funny, but the viewer is never distracted from the main story.  Why does Rooster Cogburn go out of his way to kick those Indian children?  It doesn't matter, it's just something he does; on with the plot!  They got a very good performance from a very inexperienced actress, and they let Bridges have fun as a crotchety old man.  More importantly, though, is the overall tone of the film.  The word "quirky" is often (justly) applied to Coen Brothers projects because they enjoy going off on tangents and having a cast of extremely colorful characters.  Here, they are able to keep their cast of goofy characters, but they all serve the plot, so they don't feel like diversions.  The cinematography, done by frequent Coen collaborator Roger Deakins, is noticeably impressive; this movie looks and feels as filthy and smelly as the Old West must have truly been, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't full of harsh, broad, and beautiful landscapes.  This might be the best looking Coen film since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (also shot by Deakins), and it is perhaps their best balance of gritty stories and funny characters to date.

Now, let's discuss the mumbling.  When I saw the trailer for this movie, I assumed that Bridges just had his cheeks full of chewing tobacco, because the Old West was a disgusting place and chaw is nauseatingly fitting for that time and place.  Sadly, it was simply a choice by the actor and the directors.  I guess it could be the side effect of being a rough-and-tumble character in an age where medical attention was both lacking and deficient; theoretically, they could have invented a back story for Rooster than involved a few broken jaws that healed crooked.  Whatever the reason, it was kind of obnoxious, especially when it obscured a witty quip from Bridges.  Later in the film, Damon also joins the mushmouth parade, but at least his character is given an excuse.  These atypical verbal deliveries may have been realistic for the times, but I found them generally irritating and actually kept me from understanding some key moments of dialogue.

How does this stand up to the original?  Quite well, actually.  The performances (mumbles aside) are all very good, and Bridges does a good job with an interesting character.  Honestly, I think the primary actors are all worthy upgrades over the original film; the supporting cast is far better this time around (although Robert Duvall is still better than Barry Pepper), since the original film had many unmemorable bit players.  The one thing that the 1969 film did better was show the developing relationship between Cogburn and Mattie; when John Wayne starts calling her "sister" in the film, you can feel a loving bond in his words.  That closeness is not shown in this version, although some affection is clear.  I also prefer the ending of the original better (not the climax, but the falling action) because it summed up the story of Mattie and Rooster so well.  The Coens made a very grim and gritty Western, but they did so at the cost of the sweet sibling-ish relationship between the two lead characters.

That said, this is a very good movie, and it is a Western that will appeal to those that are not already fans of the genre (read: women).  It is funny in many parts, with sharp dialogue and three characters that mesh well together.  It is painfully raw and brutal in other parts, with uncompromising violence and some truly nightmarish dental prosthetics.  And, despite all of that, it is a story of accomplishment, above all else.  Does this eclipse the original movie?  No, but it certainly makes a case as a deserving peer.

Blood Simple

Have you ever watched a movie for a second or third time and realized that, for all these years, you have been undervaluing that film?  I don't know what happened between my last viewing of Blood Simple and this time, but something changed enough to bump this from "a good first try" to one of my favorite films from Joel and Ethan Coen, which is no mean feat.

The title is taken from Dashiell Hammett's (my favorite author) novel Red Harvest, and it refers to the stupid mindset people can find themselves in after prolonged exposure to violence.  They get jumpy, they get dumb, they get...well, simple.  Ray (John Getz) and Abby (Frances McDormand) are secret lovers, trying their best to hid the fact from Julian (Dan Hedaya), Abby's husband and Ray's boss.  They don't realize that Julian has hired a private detective, Loren (M. Emmett Walsh), to dig up the truth.  And dig it up, he does.  Loren takes pictures of the couple in a steamy embrace; yes, it's part of the job, but he's a dirty pervert, too, so he goes home with a smile.  Not one to take cuckolding lying down, Julian makes a menacing call to the couple and then hires Loren to kill them.  What follows is a game of cat and mouse, where the players aren't even sure who's hunting who.

Normally, I would go on and on about what a great actress Frances McDormand is, but the fact of the matter is that she was pretty young when this was filmed, and her performance is solid, but nothing spectacular.  She certainly outshines John Getz, but I would say that her performance was about as good as Hedaya's.  That's not a knock, since he plays a greasy jealous husband so well, but it's less impressive than her many later Coen Brothers roles.  The star of this picture is M. Emmett Walsh, who is amazing as the sociopathic scumbag private dick/assassin.  He is so sleazy, I wanted to clean my TV screen after the movie finished.  Walsh is normally a decent, but not exceptional supporting player, but his nastiness here makes him one of the best noir villains I have seen.  This is the first film by the Coen Brothers, and it serves as an indicator of where their careers would lead; the most stunning character was a supporting role, the cinematography was great, and the basic plot is simple, with all sorts of complications woven over it.  This was obviously a low-budget film, with most of the violence implied and not seen, but when it is shown, the violence is jarring and very effective.  The cinematography is very noticeable, with several shots being at extreme low angles, but it is very effective on the whole; I particularly liked the frequent zooming in on unmentioned, but important just the same, details in particular scenes.  This was Barry Sonnenfeld's fist professional work (as a cinematographer --- he eventually went on to direct big movies like Men In Black), and he does a beautiful job.

This is often cited as a neo-noir, and while I usually debate the assignment of "noir" to any gritty story, it definitely is appropriate here.  It's not about the feelings of the lovers, or even the hate of the jilted husband, it's about life, death, and moodiness.  And I love me some noir, so that's a good thing.  The movie starts out fairly quietly, but the Coens are able to grab your attention early and the succeed in ratcheting up the suspense as the film progresses.  I liked that much of the story was left out of the dialogue, so the viewer had to fill in the (moderately obvious) gaps on their own.  It was shot extremely well, even if some moments betrayed the amateur nature of the filmmakers.  Some people argue that this is the best Coen Brothers movie, that their later work gets a little too kooky; they have a point, and this is a great movie, but "too kooky"?  I don't know if the Coens have reached that point yet.

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare at Goats is a great title for a movie.  Maybe not as good as "The Men Who Do Things to Goats," but that's a flick that could go in all the wrong directions.  Oddly enough, goats play a relatively small role in this film.

This is the somewhat true story of a military program that was developed to harness the psychic power of the human mind.  The tale is told primarily through flashback, as George Clooney's character explains the events to Ewan McGregor.  This program began in the 1980s, headed by Jeff Bridges' character, and it attempted all sorts of paranormal stuff.  Traveling through the astral plane, invisibility, walking through walls, telepathy, and killing via only eye contact (which is how we get the title) are the tangible goals for this group.  The two star pupils are played by Clooney and Kevin Spacey; the two become rivals because Clooney likes the New Age-ish notions of expanding human consciousness, while Spacey is interested in the more practical (read: lethal) military applications.  It's appropriate that Bridges calls his men Jedi warriors, because Clooney and Spacey represent the light and dark sides of The Force.  Years after the military decides that the program is a wash, McGregor follows Clooney into modern-day Iraq, where they find a new program being run by Spacey and representing everything Clooney and Bridges hated.

This is a goofy plot.  You would expect the movie to be just as goofy, like maybe Big Lebowski- or O Brother Where Art Thou?-level goofy, but it's not.  Whose fault is that?  I blame the Coen brothers for not writing or directing this film.  Sure, you could blame Jon Ronson, whose book the movie is based on, but that just takes away from the solid fact that this should have been a weird, goofy Coen brothers movie.  It already had Clooney and Bridges!  What more enticing do those men need?  Well, parts of the film are as funny and goofy as you would want them to be.  The directing emphasizes weird, awkward moments and sometimes those moments pay off with funny.  However, every time the movie feels like it's going to finally get permanently weird, it stops and takes a cold dose of reality.  There are a lot of depressed characters in this movie and they are well-developed, so you feel for them.  Jeff Bridges, in particular, does a fantastic job with his dramatic scenes.  He's subtle, physical, and understated, but it is really worth noticing.

The acting in this film is as good as you would expect from three Academy Award-winning actors.  Bridges resurrects some of his laid-back surfer ways from Lebowski and Clooney performs with his usual deadpan confidence (although noticeably not a lady charmer here).  Kevin Spacey doesn't have quite as much opportunity to impress here, but he's always fun to see as a bad guy.  McGregor is good too, but he's stuck in the straight man role.  I'd like to see him take another stab at an outright comedy, because he's got good timing and I know he's a good actor.

The acting performances actually increase my frustration with this film.  These guys are usually enough to make me interested in a movie if even one of them is starring, but their presence here makes the movie's shortcomings more annoying.  The fact that the actors do so well might make you think that the direction was good, but this is the first major directing project for frequent Clooney collaborator Grant Heslov.  I think Heslov has friends that are awesome actors and they helped make him seem impressive.  It's a neat trick that I'd love to try.  Still, there are a lot of awkward moments that are not used for dramatic or comedic purposes and the pace drags at times.  Ultimately, the choice to balance the humor with so much realism had to come from the director.  I disagree with this choice because treating the ludicrous as reasonable for the sake of humor degrades any attempt at sincerity.  If Heslov wanted the dramatic moments to have a lot of impact (and, judging by the performances of Clooney and Bridges, he did), he would have necessarily had to tone down the deadpan comedy.  The other option would be to make the depressingly realistic portions of the movie more comedic.  It's not impossible for a comedy like this to have a point or to have heart, but it is a difficult task to accomplish with two styles (goofy comedy and sincere drama) that are so very different.