I don't know know what you thought of the 1969
TRUE GRIT, but I saw the remake yesterday and it was an odd experience because I saw the original for the first time since I was a kid a few months back and I thought it was merely so-so. The remake, though purportedly more true to the source novel, was virtually a beat-for-beat remake of the original and consequently it was also so-so. It does improve on the original in a few ways — chief among which are not having the incredibly annoying Kim Darby in the lead, and a better, less "Hollywood" ending — but for the life of me I can't understand why it's getting the universal critical acclaim it's racking up. My guess is that since westerns are pretty much a dead genre, audiences (and critics) are starved for "horse operas," so they go crazy when a competent one shows up in the current climate of lame rom-coms, cookie-cutter Judd Apatow films (almost all of which are overrated and not funny, at least not to me), superhero movies of wildly varying quality, Michael Bay cinematic abortions that display a shocking contempt for their audience, and the annual blockbuster season that turns the screen into a toxic waste dump. The new
TRUE GRIT is not a "bad" movie by any means, but it simply is not "all that." Here's the breakdown:
- Like the original, it's too long by at least twenty minutes and it moves at a lugubrious pace. There is no suspense or thrills to be had in it and the film even manages to make Cogburn's famous horseback gunfight against four opponents devoid of excitement (which certainly cannot be said about the John Wayne version).
- Remember "Leaning On the Everlasting Arms," the tune sung by psycho Robert Mitchum in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)? Well, you sure as hell will after seeing the new TRUE GRIT, because an instrumental of it plays incessantly throughout the film.
- Jeff Bridges is excellent as Rooster Cogburn and does not in any way evoke John Wayne's version of the character. It's a totally new interpretation and much more believable than Wayne's Oscar-winning performance (which is only to be expected I guess, because Wayne brought his "god of the western" stature to every role he played, especially late in his career, even in films that were not westerns).
- Hailee Steinfeld is a perfect Mattie Ross because, unlike Kim Darby (who was Miri in the original series STAR TREK episode of the same name), she's the right age for the role (Darby was in her early twenties when playing Mattie) and is not so fucking annoying that you want to shoot her through the eyes. Like Bridges, she brings a total believability to the part and she is very good for a relative newbie.
- Matt Damon is both unrecognizable (due to makeup) and quite good as Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (pronounced "LeBeef") and makes one completely forget Glenn Campbell's utterly forgettable original version.
- The interaction between the characters is fun and at times chuckle-inducing, but the film's pacing renders the proceedings into an almost-dreamlike state. That can work in a Sergio Leone western, but this is not one of those.
- Like the original, we follow Mattie's quest to bring her father's killer to justice, but again we don't care all that much because it's a given that she will succeed and the villain (and his cronies) gets barely any screen time, so we have no character definition other than that which is automatically inferred by their narrative positioning as "black hats."
- Again we get the bit with Mattie ending up in the pit with the rattlesnakes, a sequence that was totally unnecessary to the narrative in the first place and adds nothing to the new version (other than a slightly different outcome to her up close and personal encounter with one of the poisonous reptiles).
- As previously mentioned, the film is an almost beat-for-beat remake, despite the Coen Brothers' claims that it's a "new version," and as a result the whole endeavor comes off (to me, anyway) as cinematically superfluous.
The one thing that I am glad of as a result of sitting through it is that it reminded me of
MAD magazine's excellent 1970 parody of it (from MAD #133), drawn by the stellar Mort Drucker (one of the best cartoonists ever, whose work is often unfairly overlooked because it runs in a humor magazine). I looked for images from it online and while doing so I was surprised to find that several reviewers of both the new and old version of the film cited that they found the
MAD version more memorable than the actual movie. Next to George Woodbridge, I think Drucker was the very best of
MAD's artists from the moment they shifted from a comics format to a black & white magazine. Check out these panels to see what I mean:
(I love how the one gunman is riding a hog for no apparent reason.)
But I'm straying from the remake, so allow me to sum up by stating that the new TRUE GRIT is worth seeing, but I suggest waiting for cable. It ain't worth $13.00 (NYC ticket price).
I don't know know what you thought of the 1969 TRUE GRIT, but I saw the remake yesterday and it was an odd experience because I saw the original for the first time since I was a kid a few months back and I thought it was merely so-so. The remake, though purportedly more true to the source novel, was virtually a beat-for-beat remake of the original and consequently it was also so-so. It does improve on the original in a few ways — chief among which are not having the incredibly annoying Kim Darby in the lead, and a better, less "Hollywood" ending — but for the life of me I can't understand why it's getting the universal critical acclaim it's racking up. My guess is that since westerns are pretty much a dead genre, audiences (and critics) are starved for "horse operas," so they go crazy when a competent one shows up in the current climate of lame rom-coms, cookie-cutter Judd Apatow films (almost all of which are overrated and not funny, at least not to me), superhero movies of wildly varying quality, Michael Bay cinematic abortions that display a shocking contempt for their audience, and the annual blockbuster season that turns the screen into a toxic waste dump. The new TRUE GRIT is not a "bad" movie by any means, but it simply is not "all that." Here's the breakdown:
(I love how the one gunman is riding a hog for no apparent reason.)
But I'm straying from the remake, so allow me to sum up by stating that the new TRUE GRIT is worth seeing, but I suggest waiting for cable. It ain't worth $13.00 (NYC ticket price).
I remember that MAD issue. Great movie parody, from when they were at their peak.
ReplyDeleteThe kid looks uncomfortably like a foreshadowing of Bieber. Scary.
I wanted to originally comment on this back when you first posted it.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny how you basically panned the movie, because if you check out other elements of the blog world, especially those blogs that have to do with writing and specifically writing the western genre, a lot of those people are incredibly psyched up and looking forward to seeing this movie.
I can see how a remake can often be worse than the original, but sometimes, the remake can be better than the originaly simply because the remake stays truer to the book that it was originally based on.
Gotta remember the era when the original was made. Quite often the story that a particular movie was based on was very salty and thus the treatment of it often had to be sanitized in order to have muster with the powers that be.
@G, I am very much aware of all of the points you make and did take the era of the original into account. I also noted some elements of the new version that I felt were superior to the original. That said, I still don't think much of either version of the film. There are plenty of western narratives that I greatly enjoy — THE SEARCHERS, THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, LITTLE BIG MAN, THE WILD BUNCH, the list goes on — but for whatever reason, TRUE GRIT just never did it for me.
ReplyDelete