Warning: SPOILERRIFIC

After the lights went up in the theater I began to feel a little silly for being mildly disappointed with this film. Strong performances, more than adequate filmmaking, entertaining dialogue & powerful action culminated for me into a sub-par adventure.

I would like to place blame on the advertising for the film – while the trailer is quite literally one of my favorites of the year – it gives off a sense of a certain tone of the film being much more serene, serious and together with a few bits of humor thrown in. I wasn’t necessarily expecting ‘There Will Be Blood,’ but I also wasn’t expecting ‘Lethal Weapon 2.’

The Coen’s are supremely talented at finding humor in very serious subject matter – ‘Fargo’ is all the evidence you need, but they truly honed it in ‘A Serious Man’ – showcasing a man’s metaphysical end to his life with biting wit and hilarity.

However in those two pictures the tone melded with the plot seamlessly – making that film THAT tone, shying away any other possibility for how it could have been pulled off. Here in ‘True Grit,’ the tone feels out of place.

‘Rooster’ Cogburn is a whiskey swillin,’ cotton-mouthed marauder who is certainly allowed his moments of levity – but when an entire scene uses it as a crux to trudge through it begins to feel misused. Jeff Bridges was a delight to watch and exuded an energy to make him real – however more due to the script than his performance – he is rendered too oafish to seem to pull of his miraculous feats of heroism.

Damon’s overtly arrogant Texas Ranger ‘LaBoeuf’ also suffers from this syndrome to where his character serves as nothing more than a butt to nearly every scene he is in – pushing it as far as to give him a lisp half way through the picture.

I understand the purpose of making the adult, capable males out to be buffoons to juxtapose them against severely bright & precocious 14 year-old Mattie Ross yet it falls flat when the audience is presented with two strong personalities and performances in Bridges & Damon who are simultaneously at odds & both the comic relief.

This doesn’t mean that their interactions weren’t highly entertaining – more that the level and frequency of the humor felt out of place for a coming of age story of a young woman avenging her father’s death.

I wanted more ‘No Country’ and less ‘Serious Man’ (despite liking the latter significantly more than the former).

The Coen’s are remarkably known for their memorable characters, small scale set-pieces, and quirky situations – yet scenes like meeting the bear-toting vagabond Doctor or including a moment during a high tension scene with a dwarf who replicates farm animal calls – seem at odds with the pace of the picture.

It being the Coens however, it is all still very entertaining, if frustratingly so.

Having never seen the original ’69 version of the film starring John Wayne, I cannot speak toward the quality of the film as a remake – but after seeing the trailer for the original, I’m more confused as to where the scenes that are done verbatim and where the Coen wit intersect.

Perhaps they are doing a faithful remake to showcase how awkward some of the original dialogue would be in a realistic setting, especially with Labeouf’s, ‘I had a thought to Kiss you’ scene. I wouldn’t put it passed them to make that part of the joke.

Regardless, the three leads have very strong performances – Brolin’s Chaney feels as if most of his lines hit the cutting room floor and surprisingly Barry Pepper struck me as someone whom I’d very much like to see more of.

I didn’t realize Deakins had shot this until the credits (there was a ZOOM SHOT?!) and feel this has been some of his subtlest work as of late, with grand exception to the beautiful court scene.

The processed/green screen shots at the end of the film with Bridges, Steinfeld and the horse were a little disappointing – covered even further with extreme close-ups of Bridges’ face as he is supposed to be carrying her – seemed a little too ‘cheaty’ to avoid having a full shot of him having to actually carry her.

Ultimately where the film comes short is bringing home its emotional resonance. I’ve been told that the original film’s first half hour covers what the remake did in a single V.O.’d dolly shot – robbing the audience of the emotional impact of Mattie loosing her father and determining that the best course of action is revenge. That’s a HUGE step to take for granted in a character and I would have been interested to see what Steinfeld could have done with that. Perhaps it’s a little more run of the mill – but it would make the end for Chaney that much more powerful.

Finally the impact of what our three hero’s have done doesn’t appear to have a larger scope than the reality of Killing a Bounty, Doing a Job, Seeking Revenge. The poor girl lost her father, seeks revenge, leaves home, goes on a dangerous adventure with an alcoholic and a Texan – kills a man, looses half her arm and what we see as she’s come to age is an embittered old maid.

Her horse is run ragged and ultimately killed by Cogburn who proves to be the threshold for her maturation – he thrusts her into a world she is not prepared, even if it was of her own volition. He shapes her into the broken, hardened, middle-aged woman she ultimately becomes but, like Cogburn himself, that makes her all the more human.

True Grit doesn’t make one great & powerful, but just capable to survive.

☺☺☺