11/6/24
As I always have in moments of anguish, tonight I turned to art for perspective and comfort. The Criterion Channel is showing nine Coen Bros movies this month, saving me the exhaustive burden of having to reach up to my DVD shelf in order to watch them.
Tonight it was their 2010 western masterpiece, True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges, vanishing into the role of Rooster Cogburn. Bridges has many great performances, but to vanish into a role like Rooster Cogburn, a role that had already served as an Oscar-winning capstone to the career of John Wayne, is nothing short of miraculous. The acting throughout is the best done by all in the cast, including Matt Damon and Domhnall Gleeson, unrecognizable as a nervous, skinny young bandit.
The movie is about a teenage girl, Mattie, who sets out in pursuit of justice. A criminal, Tom Chaney, has killed her father, and she intends to see him hanged or kill him herself. The justness of her cause is clear, but the route to justice is twisted. Everyone agrees that Chaney is guilty, and everyone agrees that he’s a horrible man and should be punished, but no one has the desire or resources to go after him. If Mattie wants Tom Chaney to be held accountable for his crimes, she will have to go after him herself.
The script, as with all Coen Bros scripts, is about economics. Most of their stories are about “the little man” who tries to rise above his station and is punished for it by “capital,” the “big man” at the top of the food chain who gets what he wants because he has the money to buy it. True Grit was their first script where “captial” is actually the protagonist. Mattie, the teenage girl, is the one with the money, and she uses her money to pursue justice, hiring the one-eyed alcoholic US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, and the two of them form an alliance with a Texas Ranger who has been chasing Chaney for years.
So Mattie is pursuing blood vengeance with two men whose motives are entirely financial. What’s more, they are not shining paragons of liberal thought. They are both ex-Confederate soldiers, and Cogburn rode with Confederate war-criminal William Quantrill. He also, like so many legends of the Old West, freely drifted from one side of the law to the other, whenever it happened to suit him, whichever paid more at the time. They’re both fundamentally dishonest and disagreeable men of variable skills, but they come through when the chips are down.
Long story short, the road to justice does not go as planned, and there is much sacrificed in its pursuit. Oddly enough, her life-altering journey does not alter Mattie much at all; we meet her at the end of the movie as a middle-aged woman, and she is exactly the same as she was at 14 — stubborn, opinionated and money-minded. While pursuing justice for her father, she fell in with men she considered disgusting, to pursue men who were no more or less morally upright than her allies. And yet, her adventure with Rooster Cogburn haunts her for reasons she doesn’t fully understand.
What did I get out of this movie tonight? Something about justice, and how it never looks like we think it will, and how economic forces favor the criminal with the most money. And, while it goes unmentioned, the narrative eventually overlaps with The Gilded Age, one of the many times corruption overtook the United States and the wealthy decided it was everyone’s sacred duty to make them wealthier, leading, of course, to the Great Depression, etc. And that the things that stick with us as life goes on are the memories of the people who struggled with us.
The movie is perfect, almost more like a sonnet than a screenplay, without a wasted moment, a superfluous shot or an off-key performance. Even the fancy camera moves and editing tricks that made the Coens famous are absent, giving way to a taut narrative strategy and a stately classicalism that makes the movie feel timeless.