true grit Directed by joel and ethan coen
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Mattie’s appeal to women is particularly evident in the short afterward that novelist Donna Tartt (The Secret History) wrote for the book in 2004: her great-grandmother was the first in her family to read True Grit and fell so in love with it that she passed it along to her own daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter, each of whom embraced it as well. “A great part of True Grit‘s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America,” Tartt observes. “Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses. . . . But this deadpan flatness serves a double purpose in the novel, for if Mattie is humorless, she is also completely lacking in qualities like pity and self-doubt, and her implacable stoniness—while very, very funny—is formidable too, in a manner reminiscent of old tintypes and cartes des visites of Confederate soldier boys.”
The 1969 movie makes its priorities known when Mattie valiantly forges a river on her pony to avoid being ditched by Cogburn and LaBoeuf as they take off in pursuit of the killer, Tom Chaney, and Rooster—in a line created for Wayne—declares admiringly, “She reminds me of me.” Wayne loved the novel and saw in Rooster an opportunity to have some fun with his screen persona; unfortunately Hathaway wasn’t the type to rein in his star, and Wayne turns in a hammy, self-satisfied performance as the whisky-guzzling, tale-telling, death-dealing lawman. The Searchers or Red River or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon it’s not. But then, these were the last days of the classic Hollywood western, and True Grit is typical of the big, overlit, slackly edited cowboy pictures that had become the refuge of the old guard. Dennis Hopper, whose artistic clashes with Hathaway on the set of the 1958 western From Hell to Texas had become showbiz legend, has a small role in True Grit as a young squealer who gets stabbed to death. But he came to the project straight from his directing debut, Easy Rider, whose astonishing box office success would finally convince the big studios that the counterculture was for real.
Mattie’s true character doesn’t emerge until the very end of the story, after the conflict with Tom Chaney is resolved (and though I’ll keep mum on that, a spoiler alert might be in order anyway). In the John Wayne version of True Grit, there’s a sentimental scene in which Mattie tells Rooster she’s reserved a spot for him next to her in the family cemetery; the implication is that, in years to come, she’ll find a man just like him. The Coens’ movie preserves the more poignant denouement of Portis’s novel, in which the two characters are separated by fate and never meet again. A quarter century later, Mattie takes possession of Rooster’s body, but by then she’s grown into a successful banker and a confirmed spinster; one wonders if Rooster, having ultimately proved himself a fearless and devoted friend, has ruined Mattie for any other man. A final wide-screen frame of the grown Mattie, clad in funereal black and pacing away from Rooster’s grave into the vast horizon, captures the timeless appeal of True Grit: it is, despite all its violence and harsh feeling, a love story.
