True Grit On release from 11th February
Lately the Coen brothers have become an unreliable trademark. Could there be a less hilarious megastar comedy, for instance, than Burn After Reading? To learn, then, that they have remade a hokey 1960s John Wayne western is to stir mixed feelings. But when the Coens find fairy dust in their saddlebags, as they do here, the effect is all the more dazzling for its near invisibility.
Their True Grit is a fine western about a teenage girl who wants revenge for the murder of her father by an outlaw. She hires whisky-soaked saddletramp Marshall Rooster Cogburn (the estimable Jeff Bridges in the Wayne role) to track the villain down. The remake barely adjusts the flow of the original film (adapted from Charles Portis’s novel), but the Coens plunge the story into darkness by borrowing the music from Charles Laughton’s magnificent 1955 film Night of the Hunter. They also cast a fine set of underplayers in Bridges, Matt Damon (as a Texas Ranger after the same villain) Josh Brolin (as the pursued) and Hailee Steinfeld (as the young girl). It’s still hokum, but deeply satisfying.
Lately the Coen brothers have become an unreliable trademark. Could there be a less hilarious megastar comedy, for instance, than Burn After Reading? To learn, then, that they have remade a hokey 1960s John Wayne western is to stir mixed feelings. But when the Coens find fairy dust in their saddlebags, as they do here, the effect is all the more dazzling for its near invisibility.
Their True Grit is a fine western about a teenage girl who wants revenge for the murder of her father by an outlaw. She hires whisky-soaked saddletramp Marshall Rooster Cogburn (the estimable Jeff Bridges in the Wayne role) to track the villain down. The remake barely adjusts the flow of the original film (adapted from Charles Portis’s novel), but the Coens plunge the story into darkness by borrowing the music from Charles Laughton’s magnificent 1955 film Night of the Hunter. They also cast a fine set of underplayers in Bridges, Matt Damon (as a Texas Ranger after the same villain) Josh Brolin (as the pursued) and Hailee Steinfeld (as the young girl). It’s still hokum, but deeply satisfying.
