I Watched This: True Grit

Going into a Coen Brothers movie, I expect the quirk. Some of my favourites: the black Eagles-playing taxi driver in The Big Lebowski and the lying, crying Asian dude who’s in love with Sheriff Margie in Fargo. True Grit is almost disconcertingly quirk-free. It looks and feels like a straight adventure western with characters who aren’t too difficult to figure out. There’s the young girl with more gumption than the adult men she encounters. There’s the upstanding, white bread Texas Ranger. There’s the drunk of a US Marshall who sobers up just in time to save the day. This is as different a movie as can be next to the Coens’ last, A Serious Man, which was a dense meditation on predestination and Jewish faith. If you’ve seen that film, you would have surely noticed how the opening scene – set in the early 20^th century with all the dialogue in Yiddish – is so unconnected to the rest of the film’s 1960s St. Louis setting. True Grit isn’t that quirky, but look close and it’s obviously not quirk-free. I left the theatre a bit disoriented, still, which is often the feeling after a Coen spectacle.

Maddie (Hailee Steinfeld) is all of 13-years-old yet she’s charged with taking care of her murdered father’s affairs (the film opens with a darkened screen, two porch lights first sending faint beams through the black, then eventually illuminating a pile of a body, being snowed on, at the foot of said porch). She’s arrived in a small Arkansas town to collect the body and on some outstanding debts owed to her dad. However, she’s also taken it upon herself to ensure the capture of the murderer, Chaney (Josh Brolin) since no one else seems to care. She hires a US Marshall nicknamed Rooster (Jeff Bridges), reputed to be the meanest lawman working. He’s a man of True Grit. Eventually Rooster and Maddie also throw in with a Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) who’s chasing Chaney, too, for another crime.

The first time we meet Rooster, he’s testifying during a trial for a man he captured. During the prosecution’s questioning, everything seems a-ok. Rooster tracked the suspects, killed a couple dudes in self-defence, and found the $120 they’d stolen. During the defence’s questioning though, Rooster doesn’t fare as well. The 20-feet one of the suspects, knife-in-hand, covered in pursuit of Rooster? Actually only a couple of inches before Rooster gatted him. The “13 or 15” men Rooster has killed in his law enforcement career? Actually, 23 or 24.

He’s a casual killer. Perhaps it’s just demeanour; he’s no academic after all. When Maddie goes to his flat, the backroom of a Chinese grocer, to hire him, he awakes hungover in his browned long-underwear and struggles to roll a cigarette. On the road, he babbles on, not caring that their prey might hear: “My first wife went back to her first husband, a clerk in a hardware store... my second wife wanted me to be a lawyer.” Perhaps Rooster is a savant, the Vince Carter of killers. While Vince shrugs off the elbow he put in the basket, Rooster shrugs off the slugs he put in some dude’s chest.

Thing is, while Vince Carter stands out more because of his casualness, everyone in True Grit is more or less as flippant as Rooster. Killing is casual. Maddie, even, chooses Rooster not because he can best ensure justice, but because he’s the said to be the meanest. “You’re a man of great poise,” she tells Rooster, a cheery smile on her face, the kind a kid would have watching her mom bake pie, as he takes aim and waits for Chaney to approach. Rooster answers, “This is just a turkey shoot.” Everyone in True Grit shoots turkeys and no one gets excited about it. In this world, any grown man can kill with some degree of success. Even Clancy, a dim-witted man who talks as slowly as he thinks, has numerous scalps including Maddie’s dad and a Texan politician.

The Coens have done some casual violence before. In Fargo, notably, there’s the scene at a parking lot where a ransom exchange goes completely awry. Steve Buscemi gets shot through the cheek and cries out like a man who’s only stubbed his toe (he later tries to treat his wound with tissue in the style of patching up face-cuts from shaving). There’s a contrast in Fargo between the quaint Midwest politeness and the pulp violence so that the effect is one part comedy, one part shock.

While there’s humour in True Grit, the shock is gone. The is death is levelled out. There’s no one in the film to contrast the violence against. We’re like the crowd who, at the beginning of the film, witness three men at the gallows. “There’s worse men among you,” one of the convicted criminals yells at the crowd (I guess at us in the theatre, too?). When the men drop and the ropes snap, there are only a few gasps among the crowd. Maddie, the surrogate witness for the movie audience (we see a lot of the action unfold through her eyes, after all) isn’t perturbed in the least and goes about her dad’s business. While Unforgiven, 15 years ago, subverted the casualness of classical Westerns, True Grit takes the next move and just recreates it. It’s this classicism, this seemingly pure adventure for adventure’s sake, any moralizing-on-movie-violence be damned, that’s so disorienting. When fingers get sliced off clean, I just took it for granted as a piece of the adventure.

At one point, Maddie and Rooster cut down a body hanging from a tree. Rooster, after concluding that he doesn’t know the dead man, gives the body to some guy just passing through. Maddie asks why the man takes it and Rooster replies, “It must be worth something.” Later, they encounter the body again, but with a different owner. The price he paid for it? He traded a bottle of expectorant. “I’ve taken all his teeth out,” he tells Rooster, “but you can have him (back) for a price.” These guys seem to know, give or take, what the dead are worth. Just strange, for us, to see that they’re so joyfully worthless, give or take.