Film Review: The Dude tries on The Duke’s cowboy boots for the timeless tale of True Grit
Quick Take: Dynamic film duo Joel and Ethan Cohen put their stamp on this remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic where a young girl hires an aging alcoholic U.S. Marshal to get justice for her father’s murder at the hands of a nefarious cowboy.
Special Appeal: Like old school westerns? You’ll love this. Hate westerns? You won’t mind it much because Bridges, Brolin and Damon do exactly what they need to do.
Players: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin and Matt Damon
Director: Joel and Ethan Cohen
Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of western violence
Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Rating: four out of five lightning bolts
For film fans of a certain age, John Wayne will always be known as ‘The Duke’ for his iconic take on cowboys in Rio Bravo, The Searchers and True Grit.
For those of another more recent era, Jeff Bridges is synonymous with aging iconic counter-culture heroes in The Big Lebowski, Crazy Heart and the Tron movies.
So when the Cohen Brothers, who have made a name for themselves through dark comedies (Fargo, Raising Arizona) and violent potboilers (No Country for Old Men and Blood Simple) were looking for someone to fill The Duke’s cowboy boots, it is no real surprise that they would turn to The Dude from the comedic potboiler who searched for and found The Big Lebowski.
The surprise is how well Bridges fits those iconic shoes.
Throughout True Grit, it would have been easy for The Dude to turn in his best impression of The Duke, but he really makes the flawed man underneath that well-worn hat and eyepatch his own. Matt Damon and Josh Brolin are strong in supporting roles, but True Grit really is Bridges at his ornery best.
True Grit, to its credit, isn’t just a star vehicle for Bridges because it also manages to be a tribute to a style of ensemble Westerns that just aren’t made anymore.
The story focuses on the quest for revenge sought by 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) who employs both an alcoholic U.S. Marshal (Bridges) an a fancy Texas Ranger (Damon) to bring her father’s killer (Brolin) to justice.
Newcomer Steinfeld’s delivery is a bit stilted for a character so young, but perhaps her intention was to purposely portray her character that way to show that the murder forced this child to grow up fast and enter an adult world of vengeance sooner than she ever should have.
When Mattie says lines like “They told me you had grit and that is why I came to you,” it just falls a little flat. When Bridges addresses the status of his firearm by saying “If it ain’t loaded and cocked, it don’t shoot,” things just feel more natural.
Maybe that was to show how very different these characters are, but it would have been better to see them together more on the same oratory plateau or at least find more common ground as the story unfolds.
Regardless of those choices, there are many others that honor both the memory of the 1969 original and blaze new trails for the traditional western.
In the Cohen’s cowboy world, minorities are present and presented in a sadly realistic period setting. Violence is also part of this world, but when these guns fire the bullets make bloody contact rather than spin the weapon out of another shooter’s grip.
It’s a very visceral world that the Cohens create in a little more than two hours that simultaneously feels at home toward the end of the wild West and still very much their own creation.
When the final line “Time just gets away from us,” is uttered, it made me realize that this western will probably be well visited by the Academy Awards in 2011.
Jonathan Rich is a NC Press Association award-winning journalist and film critic. He writes for Bold Life, Verve Magazine and www.hvillescoop.com. Email him at jonathanwlrichgmail.com.
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