My husband has insisted, since we saw the Coen Brothers' "True Grit", that the John Wayne version was better. I vaguely remembered seeing it in the distant past, but could not imagine that it would equal the newer film. So I'm shuffling away in the five dollar bins of DVDs in Barnes and Noble the other day (yes, I really do have too much time on my hands), and decide I'll buy it and prove my husband wrong. The allure of making him eat his words is ignoble but real. Long marriages do this to people and I am not immune. Last night we watched the older film, and I convinced my husband that he was right. Very unsatisfying.
I was surprised that the movie story lines are practically twins, despite all the hype about the Coen version being truer to the book, which I have not read and will never read. The scenes mirror each other. The dialogue is similar. The endings are different, but not enough to make a new movie. So, the fact is, the question comes up, why was this movie repeated? It was okay enough the first time out. John Wayne was fine, even though he's not a favorite of mine. Kim Darby was fine in the role of the girl. Even Glen Campbell was fine as La Beouf. It has Robert Duvall and other great character actors. The scenery is gorgeous, as it was filmed in the mountainous area of Ouray, Colorado.
But the first film, rated G, though it's unbelievably inappropriate for kids, is basically a comedy. A weird one, but with a kind of happy ending, and an exit by Wayne that is delightful. I figure the Coens couldn't stand such a sunshiny take on such a tale, and they wanted to do THE DARK VERSION. I give them credit for succeeding in that goal. And their casting is terrific, with Jeff Bridges an even more delapidated version of Rooster Cogburn, and Matt Damon very funny and touching as La Beouf. Hailee Seinfeld is good as the girl, and everyone supports that cast. The big shift is that in this film the landscape is harsh and unforgiving instead of beautiful, and the people in it are at it's mercy. It's the Coen Brothers take on randomness and fate. So the girl loses her arm from the rattlesnake bite, and never marries, and when she searches for Cogburn years later he's already dead. As an adult, she is rigid and dried up. There are signs that she could become that woman in both movies, but ending with a kind of unrequited love and failure is ironic, because a lot of people died for her to avenge her father, and she has not gone on to marry, have kids and be reconciled with her lot in life as the viewer expects.
So the two films become a kind of Rashomon test: the first is created out of a basic optimism about life and the second a pessimism. The same scenes, seen through different lenses, made me reflect differently on what the story means. The Wayne version says that a girl with true grit can find the father figure she deserves, and he will not disappoint. The Coen version says that some wounds cannot be filled, and striving to do so leaves a lot of collateral damage. In both, the girl is the enigma, headstrong to the point of suicide, naive yet nasty in her need to see a man hanged, a man down on his luck, a drunk, a pitiful hurt thing himself. She's not really likeable, and the Coens remind us of that, whereas the early film glosses over that fact. Pick your poison, as Cogburn would say.
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