‘True Grit’ gets the Coen brothers treatment

LOS ANGELES — It wasn’t the celluloid ghost of John Wayne that inspired the Coen brothers to go off into the dusty ravines and bleak prairie land of New Mexico to make “True Grit,” their first Western. No, this was a project with a storybook beginning.

The Coens grew up in a Minneapolis
suburb, the children of academics. And in a house full of books, one of
the novels that tugged at their imaginations was “True Grit,” the
quirky but intense 1968 Western by Charles Portis. The Arkansas
author, who turns 77 this month, presented a frontier tale that was
neither black nor white but always told in satirical shades of Zane Grey.

The Coens, who have been nominated for 10 Oscars
(and won in the best director and best picture categories for 2007’s
“No Country for Old Men”), are students of film history but say the
1969 version of “True Grit,” which won Wayne his only Oscar for lead
actor, is a bit of a blind spot.

“We both saw the movie as kids when it first came out, but we don’t really remember it very well, honestly,” Ethan Coen said. “I read the book to my kid, out loud, a few years ago and then we
started talking about taking our experience of the book and what we
liked about it. It’s an unusual Western story, a novel that’s very
funny and touching and compelling in many, many different ways. So it
wasn’t the movie.”

Regardless, the title is the same, and for moviegoers of a certain age, this Christmas Day
release from Paramount Pictures will be perceived as a remake. That
presented the Coens with the challenge of finding someone who could
fill Wayne’s boots in the role of besotted U.S. Marshal Reuben J.
“Rooster” Cogburn. Their answer was Jeff Bridges, a native son of Hollywood who memorably worked with the Coens on “The Big Lebowski.”

Bridges, who at 61 is about the same age as Wayne
was in his “True Grit” days, knows the headlines are coming — “The Dude
meets the Duke” is hard to resist — but the actor who won
an Academy Award for last year’s “Crazy Heart” says the Coens’ script
and Portis’ novel have so much gravity that he never felt like he was
tilting toward the late Wayne.

“It never crossed my mind when we were making the film,” Bridges said of the shoot in New Mexico and West Texas.
“The Coens mentioned the idea of doing a Western to me years ago but
when I got the script and it was ‘True Grit’ I was surprised. Then I
read the book and it made perfect sense. It’s very Coen-esque.”

The core story is the same in the novel and both films: A 14-year-old girl, Mattie Ross,
hires a cantankerous, one-eyed lawman to track down a hired hand named
Chaney who murdered her father. The youngster goes along for the
manhunt, as does a Texas Ranger, La Boeuf, who has motives of his own. In the new film, Josh Brolin, with sullen menace and a dim stare, plays Chaney, while Matt Damon is La Boeuf, a sort of preening dime-novel caricature who is consistently ambushed by the savage realpolitik of the Old West.

Bridges may find himself in the Oscar race again, but this film lives and dies on the performance of Hailee Steinfeld,
working in her first feature film. The Coens say the whole movie was
riding on two things: the way their cast looked in the saddle and the
way their starlet — who turned 14 this month — handled herself.

“If the actors had not been great riders, we would
have been screwed and if we didn’t have the right person in that role
we would have been screwed,” Joel Coen said. “It
could have gone off the rails pretty quick. She wasn’t acting in a
vacuum either; she had to hold her own with Jeff and Matt. There’s a
big part of moviemaking that is just being lucky, and we were very,
very lucky to find her.”

Two casting directors hopscotched across the U.S.
for a year and meeting with young rodeo riders and country girls. “They
looked at thousands of people, literally, through online submissions,” Ethan Coen said. “And we found Hailee in L.A. — she’s from Thousand Oaks. The irony of that was not lost on us. She came in late in the process too, maybe just 10 weeks before we started shooting.”

Bridges admits he was worried about the late
arrival: “Right up until the first day of the shooting, I didn’t know
if she had the goods. She is a lovely person, but I didn’t know if she
could handle this role. You have to have chops. You have to have
talent. And she does.”

Steinfeld, talking about her character, could have
been describing herself among the “Grit” ensemble: “She’s this tough,
witty, savvy girl but — as much as she is all that — she still is a
14-year-old girl away from home. She stands up to these guys and that’s
what I love about her most.”

The Coens are known for blue language and black
humor that often runs red with blood; most of their movies to date have
been R-rated affairs. “True Grit,” though, is PG-13.

“A movie that younger audiences wouldn’t be excluded from — that was important,” Joel Coen said. “There was a reason I read it to my kid. I thought he would be
interested in it because the protagonist is a child. For the same
reason, I think it could be very interesting to kids as a movie. That
was the ambition from the beginning.”

His brother added: “I think it’s a movie that 14-year-olds should be able to see and would want to see.”

There’s something about “Grit” that carries a Mark
Twain texture — maybe it’s the way Brolin’s character channels the
guttural malice of Injun Joe or the way Mattie has a bit of Tom, Becky
and Huck in her persona.

“Mattie is a bit more of a pill than Tom Sawyer, a product of rectitude, you know? But they are equally compelling characters,” Ethan Coen said. “She’s a go-getter, she’s no shirker.” Joel Coen added: “They both end up in caves and startlingly close to dead people.”

It’s not clear, however, if the film’s moments of
wrenching violence will make it the holiday movie choice for families.
And then there’s the language barrier: Dying characters who announce “I
am shot to pieces!” may make some contemporary audiences giggle and
mainstream America might not be as excited as the Coens about Portis’
oratorical curlicues and contraction-free speechifying of the 19th
century.

Bridges, however, thinks people will be charmed to hear his crowing Rooster.

“Rooster has all these wonderful long monologues —
you think he’d be the strong silent type, but instead he’s this
blustering boor in a way. He wants to tell his life story and you can’t
shut this guy up. Everybody in the film is a talker, and it’s
fascinating stuff, really, these lives and voices that feel like part
of another time.”

The film is full of sweeping vistas and haunting textures, much of that the work of Roger Deakins,
a cinematographer who has been nominated for eight Oscars but has never
won. The Coens used more computer graphics on this project (for action
scenes and safety reasons) than on their previous movies and
encountered new challenges. As Joel Coen put it: “You know what changes the nature of a production? Working with animals. That was new for us — horses.”

There’s one especially intense scene where Cogburn
gallops into gunfire and, facing superior numbers, puts his tether
between his teeth so he can use both hands to shoot. It’s a
high-adrenaline moment and it was done without a stunt double or CG, a
fact that the cast and crew are still talking about.

“For me it was the excitement of being a kid and the
fear of falling off, but we did it,” Bridges said. “It was a hot,
windy, gusty day. It was one of things I’ll remember about making the
movie, that and seeing the Coens in cowboy hats. That put a smile on my
face.”

Wearing hats was about as far as Western adventure went for the citified Coens. “I did not get on a horse, not once,” Ethan Coen said. “If ever we were going on a horse, this was the time. It didn’t happen.”

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