It has done that before, of course, but rarely with a movie with big stars, some serious intent and an audience-flattering amount of irony and inexplicable high jinks. It's almost written as a comedy, and it could be one if it were not for the occasional explicit gore and shock. It was given a PG-13 rating, the great cop-out, because there's absolutely no nudity or hint of same. On-camera severed fingers - OK; on-camera bare boob - go stand in the adult corner, where the box office returns diminish substantially because the audience under 13 is cut way back.
And yet "True Grit" is a tale that follows the adventure of a plucky young girl. It's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" without all that messy coded Christianity. Of course kids want to see it, and of course they shall. Besides, I'm probably more susceptible to snakes in a skeleton than your average 13-year-old. Strictly Indiana Jones stuff.
"True Grit," made for $38 million, accumulated $95 million at the box office through Sunday. It lost 2 percent of its audience between its opening Dec. 22 and last week, an almost unheard-of drop-off - 30 percent is considered normal and not alarming.
I've heard "True Grit" described as a solemn or traditional Western; I don't think it's either of those.
To call it "solemn" is not to be acquainted with the rest of the Coen brothers' work, which may be violent or emotional or fraught, but is never solemn. The height of Coen brothers humor, I think (always excepting "The Big Lebowski," which is the classic stoner/screwball comedy with a constant flow of good old Hollywood gags, including Busby Berkeley dream sequences), is the wood-chipper scene in "Fargo." There's nothing funny about it, of course, except there is everything funny about it.
"O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is funny too, mostly because of George Clooney as the world's goofiest con man, but it also contains a Ku Klux Klan rally; worthy families being kicked out of their homes during the Depression; lots of shotguns, many of them fired at someone; and, to end it all, an impressive apocalyptic flood. "Some Like It Hot" it isn't.
Even "No Country for Old Men" was funny. Listen to Tommy Lee Jones' conversations with his deputy or with the wife of the man he's hunting; observe the excruciating scene with two men, two hotel rooms and one air duct. It's played for laughs that the audience can't realize, because the audience has some investment in the continuing health of one of the characters.
Nor is "True Grit" a classic Western except in the basic outlines of the story, which was taken from the novel by Charles Portis. For one thing, it does not revel in the Western landscape in the way of John Ford. There are a few vistas, but usually the foreground is occupied by something else - a hanging body, a ramshackle cabin, a camp on a bluff. Some of what might be the prettiest scenes are overexposed, and I have to believe that's intentional - the Coen brothers are craftsmen. They seemed to be saying: Do not romanticize these people or this land, they are as dislikable and ornery as you think they are, even the good ones.
In general, I think, the Coens don't much care for the outdoors. Even in "Miller's Crossing," it was the piney woods where the scariest and most irrevocable things happened. The outdoors - and there was plenty of it - in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is where the creepy Southern Gothic thing was lurking. Even in "The Big Lebowski," it was the bridge out of town and the beach at Malibu where the bad things happened, not all the corrupt mansions that inhabited the rest of the story. "Fargo" was nothing but one long forbidding landscape. "No Country for Old Men" had lovely shots of the old American West, but they only suggested menace, the place where Javier Bardem might ride over the next hill with his cattle-killing gun.
"True Grit" doesn't romanticize the West either; it doesn't even really show it. It's a movie about characters - including the comical Matt Damon - thrown together in pursuit of a character who may or may not be worse than they are. It's a fable of ambivalence.
"True Grit" has both truth and grit, and it's easy to ignore the dark side of the
high jinks.
Fool: Mark it, nuncle: Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest, keep on good terms with jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page F - 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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