It’s the language that David Milch, with an overload of barroom pyrotechnics, could only approximate in Deadwood–and even without the curse words, I’d take Mattie Ross in a verbal showdown with Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen. “You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements.” “A saucy line will not get you far with me.” Here are some passages from the novel that made it onto the screen: Portis, the reclusive author of a handful of novels (including Norwood, Masters of Atlantis, Gringoes, and Dog of the South, all of which have devoted cult followings), and a former journalist, supposedly learned the rhythms and cadences of late-19th century Southern speech working on newspaper stories in rural northwest Arkansas.
One of the best things about True Grit is that all of it is written in that vernacular, the speech of people who, while they may have been illiterate, were raised on readings of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, an English practically devoid of contractions and Latinate words. “Where,” Mattie wants to know, “can I find this Rooster?” The Coens’ script preserves the thumbnail description of the marshals available to her: Mattie is headstrong but sensible she knows her limits and understands that to accomplish her task she must have the assistance of stout officers. First serialized 43 years ago, like so many great American novels were, in the Saturday Evening Post True Grit is a monologue in which an elderly Arkansas woman named Mattie Ross relates her adventures as a 14 year old in pursuit of her father’s killer, a no-good named Tom Chaney, into the wild territory of the Indian Nation. What’s surprising is how few reviewers of the film are familiar with Charles Portis’ great novel and seem to know it only as the basis of the amiable, but sloppily made, 1969 John Wayne vehicle. (Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, which, to me, was a pretentious, overblown genre piece, and was written for the movies, doesn’t count.) (Read: those of us who don’t explode into peals of laughter at every frame of The Big Lebowski.)įor the first time, the Coens have sublimated their own instincts to the service of the material, perhaps because for the first time they have selected material from an artist superior to themselves. Gloriously absent are the stylistic quirks and film school indulgences that have plagued their work over the years, at least in the minds of those of us who aren’t uncritical fans.
#Cast of true grit movie
Audiences seem to agree-the movie opened Wednesday to strong box office, and will likely be the brothers’ most popular movie ever. Or to say it another way, it’s their least characteristic film. True Grit is the Coen Brothers’ best, in large part because it isn’t the best Coen Brothers film.