Film review: True Grit (Director: Joel and Ethan Coen)

It was a matter of time before the Coen brothers would embark on a Western, having set the stage with film who had the look and feel of Westerns, their epic quality, their open and bare landscapes, their lonely, lost heroes. True Grit is thereforein a way a successor to masterpieces such as Fargo or No Country for Old Man. At the same time, it must be placed in a tradition that to symbolizes American film more than any other genre.

The film, adapted from a book that saw an earlier adaptation starring John Wayne, is a Western as much as it is a Coen brothers film. It features the strongly individual, struggling, sometimes quite bizarre characters known from all of their movies, characters who they treat with the same respect, villains and heroes alike. There is no black and white in their films, everyone, no matter on which side they stand, is given dignity. True Grit is no exception.

The film tells the story of a girl who hunts the killer of her father, and for this purpose recruits and old and hardened US marshal (Jeff Bridges), who are later reluctantly joined by a Texas ranger (Matt Damon). There is little John Wayne in this film, more of the archaic desolation of John Ford's later films (some starring Wayne, of course), some of the brutal hopelesslness of Sergio Leone, a dose of the longing and sense of loss of Eastwood.  It may well be closest to the laconic dryness of Jarmusch's Dead Man. Not least in its atmospheric density and its unique and consistent look and feel, courtesy of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Where it truly differs from all of them, is in its assertion of life. There is nothing pessimistic about it. The violence, the brutality, the dying do not affect the richness, the value, the desirability of life. For one, the film is full of  the Coen's trademark humour, which is ironic, sharp, sometimes bordering on slapstick and always subversive. The humor contrasts the starkness and bleakness of the world it shows.

Secondly, the aforementioned dignity is given to all the characters, the suffering and dying is accompanied by a warm humanity, as in the death of the young gang member dying in a rather arbitrary and meaningless fashion. The humanistic perspective which refuses to condemn is most striking in the case of the target of the protagonists' quest, the killer portrayed by Josh Brolin. Far from being one-dimensionally evil, he, too, is a lost soul, searching for something he is not quite sure of, drifting along, desperately longing to belong somewhere. When he is ordered by the gang leader he has joined to guard the girl they had captured instead of riding out with them, his disappointment is almost childlike. They are all lost souls here and no-one throws the first stone.

Particularly not Bridges' Marshal. He is the tough, hardened gunman who has seen it all, connot be surprised by anything and has no illusions about humanity. As with everybody, those labels don't stick, they are not eanough to contain the whole of the man. The Coens have succeeded in creating characters that are too complex, too round, too ritualistic to fit into drawers.

In the end, True Grit is a surprisingly optimistic, warmhearted film, not so much a Western, as a film about real people who just happen to live in a certain time and place, full of humor and full of life, a life which accepts death and violence as part of it but does not allow them to take control.