True Grit: Why can't the Coen brothers just play it straight?
Remember when the Coen brothers were America’s greatest young filmmakers? Over the years, they blended cult cool with awards endorsement and entered the tiny group of directors whose work is automatically must-see – even if the film is a spectacularly ill-judged remake of The Ladykillers. They’ve kept this status into their fourth decade working together, helped by the Oscars pelted at No Country for Old Men, and when their new film, True Grit, opens this week, their legions of fans will no doubt troop dutifully to the box office. But when you see it, reflect on this: isn’t there something missing? Like, say, something resembling actual human heart?
Let’s backtrack. They debuted with 1984’s Tex-noir Blood Simple, but it was in the Nineties when the Coens morphed from being promising genre-samplers into festival darlings and hipster heroes. This was a time when Quentin Tarantino was busy teaching the world to laugh at accidental decapitations and anal rape, and the world was a generally a pleasant, post-Cold War, pre-9/11 place. Irony was the defining mode, the post-modern nudge, the aesthetic du jour, and the Coens went there again and again, delivering arch pastiches like Miller’s Crossing in 1990, O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000, and now True Grit. Which is a pity, because they’re capable of much, much more.
The Coen’s least tongue-in-cheek films are consistently their best – The Big Lebowski gets the laughs, but it’s Fargo that stays with you. They seemed to realise this with No Country for Old Men, finally coming up with a classic by ditching the genre games and delivering an honest-to-God, straight-up meditation on mortality, and emboldened by the resulting silverware bonanza – and having got the already-scheduled Burn After Reading out of their systems – they made A Serious Man, their most puzzling film. Sure, it’s not for everybody, but its mysteries and air of actually-lived experience mean it’s worth a thousand Hudsucker Proxies. It's no surprise, then, that True Grit, a period Western made with the brothers’s new-found icy focus, would be eagerly anticipated.
Sadly, that’s not what’s arrived. Instead, we’re back in the world where the Coens superciliously dip in and out of whatever genre pleases them, smugly reducing every character to a punchline waiting to happen, and we’re denied the spare, taut nightmare True Grit could have been. And why they got Jeff Bridges to play every scene like your drunk uncle’s John Wayne impression, nobody will every know. Joel, Ethan – the Nineties have ended; this joke has worn thin.
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