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Arts & Entertainment

A Showdown With True Grit

Wherein PJ takes pot shots at the very popular, Academy Award nominated movie, True Grit.

PJ, who grew up on a steady diet of TV Westerns, had been waiting a long time to see True Grit.  He had passed on this movie for his Holiday line up, and, instead, opted for The Fighter, Paramount’s other Christmas picture.  Westerns these days, he knew, never seem to “click” at the box office.

But, as often happens in the movie industry, predictions go awry. True Grit, it turns out, performed quite well, and now happens to be one of the highest grossing Westerns of all time.

Anyway, once in the throes of January, a lean time for new movie releases, the opportunity to book the movie presented itself.

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And so PJ, on the opening 1 p.m. Friday matinee, armed with a wonton soup, a large popcorn and, of course, chocolate almonds, settled in for the Coen Brothers’s reprisal of the old John Wayne flick. By the way, don’t be thinking you can be bringing Chinese food into the theater. This is a luxury reserved only for ownership.

Now, let’s first share a thought or two about the Coen Brothers. PJ has often been heard saying that if they just went straight and created a “normal” movie, it would be destined to become a classic. These guys are that good. Not unlike Quentin Tarantino, however, their movies are always “out there” yet brilliant. PJ is still ruminating over the scholarly A Serious Man. One must always look for subtlety, nuance and symbolic meaning in their movies. Every detail is well-thought, well crafted and meaningful.

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But once again, another of PJ’s preconceived beliefs went awry.

True Grits’s fluidity was punctuated with distracting errors and seeming incongruities. Some so extreme that PJ became focused on these details and lost sight of the movie as a whole. But this is a Coen Brothers flick. It had to be deliberate. Right?

It must be that the movie-makers were paying ironic and nostalgic homage to all those poorly made Westerns of yesteryear. They must have been poking affectionate fun. Or is this movie just full of plain old dumb mistakes?

Let’s take a look at some of PJ’s observations and you decide.

The movie takes place in a land of lawlessness, the Wild West. Yet, Mattie repeatedly gets her way by threatening the modern day method of getting one’s way: litigation. She’s going to take everyone to court. But, she does not need to. Just one or two well placed threats to sue the horse trader, and bam, he cowers and caves. Almost everyone acquiesces to Mattie’s knowledge of the law.

Jeff Bridges’s character, Rooster Cogburn, claims he was with Quantril (isn’t that a great name?) in Lawrence, Kansas. PJ looked it up. Indeed 200 innocents were slaughtered there, yet Rooster denies the massacre. He does, however, endure Mattie and ensures her safety. Maybe he’s got a guilty conscience from all those other women and children he killed in Lawrence.

At first Rooster decides to leave without Mattie. She is a stubborn little thing, though, and fords the river on her horse, Little Blackie, to get to Mr. Cogburn. This is a treacherous crossing and she and the horse almost go completely under–several times. Yet, when she reaches the opposite bank, she is 100 percent bone dry. Little Blackie, too! A miracle? A mistake? A poke of fun?

Whatever it was, it was disconcerting.

Later again Mattie, who we now know is impervious to water, is filling an enormous bucket that miraculously appeared. Where in the world did it come from? Anyway, she is half up to her knees and then falls into the water from the recoil of her gun.  She, once again, in the very next scene is dry. Very. How does she do this?

Fluffy, windswept snowflakes are often seen blowing about. In some scenes the wind is heard to howl, yet the tree branches are still.

And then there are the gunshot wounds. A joke in PJ’s family when he was a kid was the oft-heard utterance in cowboy movies, “It’s only a flesh wound.” Well, folks, True Grit takes the flesh wound to a new level:

Matt Damon has some really great recuperative powers. He is no Shane. Shane’s shirt, if you remember, had a dark spot widen as he rode off. Matt though bleeds for only a moment. He’s a real coagulator! A bullet that traveled through his shoulder and out his back neither hurt nor bled much at all. And certainly it didn’t slow him down or diminish his aim with the Sharps Carbine from 400 yards. He even lifted Mattie with the bad arm onto Little Blackie after she was snakebit. Amazing! And that awful mouth wound. Rooster was concerned that a tongue wound couldn’t be bound, yet Matt gives a lovely smile a moment later wherein his uppers, lowers, tongue and lips which had all been previously shredded, were portrait perfect.  What a guy!

Josh Brolin, it must be said, does seem a bit surprised when he is shot in the abdomen. All the damage this bullet did, however, was to confound Josh who pronounces that he thinks he was hit in the short rib. PJ looked, but was unable to see a  hole in his shirt. Kevlar? And, of course, this shot didn’t slow him down a bit either.

Near the end, it appears that Rooster is shot as well.  But it must have really only been a flesh wound.  It takes more than a bullet to slow down Rooster Cogburn!

In the final scene we are told that up till three days ago Rooster was in a Wild West show with Cole Younger and Frank James. This scene takes place 25 years afterwards.

OK, hold it one minute...

If you do the math and add 25 years to Rooster’s apparent age, he’d have been about a 100 in 1903. His tombstone claims he was 78, but Rooster sure didn’t look 53 in the movie.

(By the way, one thing the movie got right was that Wild West Show. Cole and Frank did tour the country in a style similar to the Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Show.)

More errors abound, but PJ is thinking you are getting the point, so enough. But he is puzzled. Were these honest-to-goodness-errors? Or are the Coen Brothers, these master film makers,  poking fun at the Western genre with deliberate miscues?

What ever the case, the continuity and serious nature of the movie as a piece of art was damaged. It was for PJ, but apparently not for the Academy.

True Grit, you see, has been nominated for ten awards. Ten.

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