Two Great "Grits" -- For Two Different Reasons
The first thing to note is that there is nothing wrong with a GOOD, well cast remake of an earlier film. Sequels are a different story...it is rare that "a story perfectly told" can or should be extended beyond its natural ending.
But to tell a great story AGAIN, perhaps for a new generation, perhaps in a new way, and certainly with new actors and techniques...well, it is still hard for a movie remake to be as good as its original, but not impossible.
Which "True Grit" is "better"?
Oh, I know which one for me: the first one. But for these specific reasons:
ONE: The two final scenes -- the bleak and dullish ending of Charles Portis' novel was removed and two extremely moving scenes were added to give the 1969 True Grit some poignance and uplift. The first of the two scenes finds the infamous lawyer J. Noble Daggett appearing in Rooster's small room, and we realize he's a pipsqueak and we realize that Rooster really loves Mattie like a father. The second of the two scenes finds Rooster and Mattie at the family gravesite where she wants Rooster to join her in rest...neither of them, she surmises, will marry and have families. And the movie ends with John Wayne, and Rooster is still alive.
TWO: Elmer Bernstein's score...poignant, sad and then rousing for those two final scenes, classic Western all the way to those scenes. And best of all when Rooster faces down his four adversaries and Bernstein's power chords slap in just as Rooster cocks his rifle.
THREE: John Wayne. As we shall see, Jeff Bridges was fine, but Wayne was HISTORIC. It was 1969, the year after the assasinations and riots and protests of 1968, the year of the moon landing, the year of Woodstock. And while much of the counterculture just wanted John Wayne to go away, most of them had to admit that the Tough Old Bird was going out with a bang in "True Grit." It was a fun role, and a bit of a parody role for Wayne, but he also moved everybody in the part and proved capable of some Best Actorly long monologue speeches. So they gave him the Oscar after all these years and in a year when half the country hated him(but the other half loved him.) The big surprise: True Grit was hardly Wayne's final film. He made eleven more and worked through 1976.
The Coen's 2010 True Grit doesn't have those great final two scenes...they restored the dour and dull "trailing away" ending of the book..a sequence that has neither Rooster nor LaBouef nor the Young Mattie in it. We are asked to accept an older actress who looks nothing like the young one we saw as Mattie for the whole movie; we are asked to watch a grand rousing adventure peter out to nothingness. (Should they ever remake Jaws, should they restore THAT book's dullish finale, with the shark just drowning under harpoon hits and sinking with Quint caught on the ropes and drowning with him?)
As for the music: Courtesy of their guy, Carter Burwell, The Coen's True Grit has Genuine Folksy Gospel Western music and a certain elegiac streak. When it comes time for Rooster to face the Four, Bernstein's rousing thrills are replaced by a kind of soulful thunder. But the music simply isn't as all-present and enveloping in the Coen film...their film is "too artful" to go for the heart. (Except for one stretch I'll describe below.)
The Coen's True Grit has Jeff Bridges in the great role of Rooster Cogburn. Bridges and Wayne pretty much played Rooster at the same age(early sixties) and yet Bridges' Rooster "feels" younger and sounds much older than Wayne. Bridges is great and got Oscar nominated, but there is nothing really historic about Bridges in the part. Plus, you can't always make out what he is saying in a voice as garbled and strained as he chooses to act in it.
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The Coens' True Grit is much better made than the 1969 original. Even back IN 1969, we saw Henry Hathaway's True Grit as rather a typical Hal Wallis/Hathaway cheapjack job(on the order of The Sons of Katie Elder or Five Card Stud; you could look them up) versus the "expensive and ultra-polished" look of fellow 1969 Westerns Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Peckinpah's masterly The Wild Bunch.
In 1969, what pulled True Grit above its cheap production values was the greatness of Charles Portis' story(a Mismatched Trio of Heroes set out after a Bad Man), the lushness of Bernstein's music, the beauty of the outdoor settings, the nostalgic power of John Wayne.
But it certainly got a makeover in the Coen version, clearly the more polished and professional production(credit Roger Deakins, as practically always, with making True Grit look FINE...with great blue-gray snowy days and crystalline nights.)
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The Major Flaw Forever in the 1969 True Grit was the performance of Glen Campbell as the Texan LaBouef. The book called for a rugged young Texas Ranger, we got a boyish man who read his lines as if he was in an Eighth Grade play. It is a textbook example of acting by someone who doesn't know HOW. You can see Campbell waiting for his cues, trying to remember his lines, almost invariably making the WRONG choice of how to read the lines.
Now, they were hard lines to read. Portis had written the dialogue in a kind of over-articulate contraction-free vernacular that didn't sound much like regular speech. But Wayne handled it, and Kim Darby as Mattie handled it. Campbell (in after Elvis Presley said no) could not.
Therefore, the 2010 True Grit moves well ahead of its 1969 predecessor by not only casting a capble actor as LaBouef -- Matt Damon -- but by giving the usually colorless Damon a really good version of LaBouef to play: too stuck on himself as a Texas Ranger, too much the talker, yet a young man of heart and character when the chips are down.
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The Coen's True Grit gives us an evenly matched Rooster, Mattie, and LaBouef and settles down as a character piece in which these thrown together comrades come to know each other and like each other(though sometimes they DON'T like each other) and eventually take part in the truly great climactic scenes(in BOTH versions) that involve Rooster riding One on Four in a Dogfall and Mattie falling into a terrifying snake pit.
Two adjacent scenes in the Coens' True Grit that are great: a drunken Rooster trying to shoot corn nubbins out of the sky while verbally parrying with LaBouef ("I do not accept that it was I who shot you; there were guns going off all over the place")...followed by a long stretch with sad, lonely music as the trio ride over rough and snowy terrain on their continuing quest. Is the quest futile?(Or as Bridges' Rooster writes, "fudel?")
It is not futile, as proven when Josh Brolin shows up as Mattie's prey Tom Chaney(the man who Shot Her Father) and Brolin turns in a truly eccentric performance with a twangin' drawl, a slow-witted gaze and a perpetually surprised manner. Its GREAT near-cameo work from the always-working Brolin.
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The Coens' True Grit was my favorite movie of 2010, coming right at the end of the year on Christmas Day and moving me yet AGAIN with its tale of an old gunfighter and his young spirited charge. And yet...I still like the original better(it was my second favorite of 1969, behind The Wild Bunch). The reasons I cited at the top of the post are why, and again: the better ending(with BOTH of the final scenes working together to move and uplift us), the more emotionally powerful Elmer Bernstein score, and John Wayne doing something very special near (but not at) the end of his career.
But still. The 2010 is a great adventure too. With a different TONE. Its rare you get two great movies from one great source like that.
And one more thing:
Much of the Coens' True Grit is as much a "faithful shot by shot, line by line" remake of the original as Van Sant's version of Hitchocck's Psycho. And when the two movies match up, the old one WINS:
Rooster versus the Four in the Coen remake, for instance, is missing two crucial lines from the original:
Mattie: (Watching the joust) Rooster Cogburn? No grit? Not much!
Rooster: (Pinned under his dead horse.) Dammit, Bo...first time ya gave me reason to cuss ya.
I waited for those lines in the Coen version of the joust sequence (given that all the OTHER lines in the sequence were in the Coen version, such as LaBouef's "They are too far and riding too fast")...but no. Why?
And yet: the Coens must have put at least six entirely new scenes into their True Grit, each and every one of them with a certain "flavor" that made a new movie out of the same story: the incident with the hanged man, the great scene with the Bear Man(with his great voice and his great lines), Rooster nonchalantly kicking the abusive Indian boys off the stoop for torturning a small horse, etc.
The Coen's True Grit is a "Shot for shot line for line remake" ...with six new scenes.
And that makes it great, too