It is easy to admire the Coen Brothers’ catalog, but harder, I find, to enjoy it. No Country for Old Men, Fargo, Barton Fink stand like Gothic cathedrals in the landscape of contemporary film–all imposing architectural feats meant to be explored because of their inherent hollowness (and hallowed-ness). You can angle it, twist it, or stand it straight up at intimidating heights, but space is still only space, however perversely recessed or nook-ified.
But TRUE GRIT is different chiefly because it is filled/flawed by a beating heart. It is moxie at war with humble humanity, as witnessed in protagonist Mattie Ross. On either side of Mattie is Rooster Cogburn, representing the fat, faded glory to which she aspires to, and Texas Ranger LeBoeuf, representing the relentless trial-and-error work ethic she runs from. LeBoeuf carries his failures in his countenance (and so of course Mattie finds him fey and unattractive), while Cogburn inflicts them on others to preserve his own myth.
Cogburn is the Coen Bros. behind those technical masterworks–empty inside but so frayed and blackened on the outside as to give the appearance of world-weariness, like death without the dying. It would not be surprising to learn that Cogburn’s eyepatch is a but an illusion, much in the way the abrupt, hazy ending of No Country provides the illusion of deeper meaning. If it provokes discussion then it’s done its job, but it’s not true grit–it simply doesn’t have the balls to stake its reputation, its myth, and yes, its heart on possible failure, and so it guts itself of the extra weight.
Cogburn tries to shed Mattie not because he fears for her safety but because he fears he will not be able to accomplish what his young admirer has hired him to do, and what would Mattie think of him then? Mattie succeeds in killing her father’s killer, and while the end may justify the means, the means do nothing for the end, and so she feels as if she hasn’t even done the thing at all. It is a different story for LeBoeuf; though he doesn’t get to pull the trigger on Chaney, the man he’s long been hunting, it is enough to save Cogburn’s life with a well-placed gunshot–a shot that a man unsure of his own abilities would not have taken. For LeBoeuf, that confidence has come through honest persistence, and so it does not matter that the man on the other end of the barrel is not Chaney.
At best, Cogburn knows he can only succeed in saving Mattie from himself/herself, his myth be damned. And the Coen Bros. seemed to know that making a film this heavy on narrative clarity and with a beaming, unobscurable emotional core would mean forgoing their usual operating procedures, if not outright calling them into question. Indeed, some critics have complained that TRUE GRIT does not much resemble a Coen Bros. film, and others (channeling Mattie) have no doubt praised it on pedigree alone. But it is flawed (and enhanced, I think) in a way the Coens, ever the technical overachievers, have never allowed from themselves before. If the cynicism and the black humor are still there they no longer arise from a level of detachment, and they have also been relegated to the edges as a byproduct and not the product itself. I think, however, that those who have not entirely subscribed to the Tao of the Coens are much more likely to reap something bittersweet and heartbreaking from the film, not snickeringly dour.
