KOAN BROTHERS

True grit indeed: who else but the Coen’s have the sheer chops to make such a water-logged, hefty film? Well, exactly the people who could make its buoyant inverse—BURN AFTER READING—a few years prior. And the same people who made A SERIOUS MAN, the heady existential exercise that bridged these poles. Oh, right, and who also made the Oscar-nabbing action thriller NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN just before those. Oh, and fucking FARGO, which is just the best movie ever made, aye? Oh yeah, these guys can make movies – I forgot.

Still, TRUE GRIT, is remarkable – even in a oeuvre of such pervasive ass-kicking. From the very first shot, this is the real McCoy; nothing is wasted. The bit at the gallows, with the “last words” of the trio to-be-hanged, is a veritable see/hear/speak-no-evil that speaks volumes towards the period, the Coen’s dark humor, and the film’s overall themes of redemption and justice. Or the detail of the dentist wandering the territory on horseback, with a bearskin pelt to keep him warm – not actually a pelt, though, an entire bear skin. There is something so wonderfully odd, and with such tremendous depth, to every single sketch the Coen’s etch out on their filmic pad. They are so unlike most filmmakers, in that the more they tell stories the more I’m convinced they have stories to tell; each successive and wonderful film does not represent the consumption of a finite resource of creative ideas, but rather a forum by which new ideas take shape, where new movies are conceived. There’s something organic and interminable about the Coen’s creative process then, that gives me hope for storytelling in general. And this is a good thing.

The ‘tween’ at the center of this film – a precocious up-and-coming actress named Hailee Steinfeld (Jew Grit) – is the fuel running this furnace. She elevates every scene to another level, which is impressive for any actress, not to mention such a young one, but doubly impressive when she plays against Jeff Bridges—who is Marlon freaken Brando with an uglier mug. Method Acting is only the beginning of Bridges performance here, where he’s as much of a Dude as he ever was, with grit, indeed, to spare. Watching such talent perform, under such meticulous direction and against such intelligent mise-en-scene, gives me that same sensation I have after reading a REALLY GOOD BOOK after a couple of back-to-back beach-reads that, you know what, I actually kind of liked. It’s that edifying moment of realizing what a real artist is capable of; not just entertainment but enlightenment. So much more than fun.

And so they do it again. The Coen Brothers films are experiences that they ask to have with each of us who are wise enough to listen. As if they are producing not films at all but Buddhist koans, tiny paradoxical stories, the contemplation of which, between master and student, achieves an utterly deeper kind of comprehension. And I can’t think of better back-to-back Coen Brothers koans than A SERIOUS MAN and TRUE GRIT, especially when you consider the immensely disparate sensibilities of these works. A SERIOUS MAN, if it’s about anything, is about the meaninglessness of life, the unknowability of God, the futility of plans. TRUE GRIT, recognizing the thematic standards of its genre, is set in a world and in a time of immense order; of clear cut good-and bad; of utter and inescapable justice. It’s Mattie Ross’ RIGHT to shoot Tom Chaney, the man who killed her father. Retribution, and restoration of order, is never a question. There is something so comfortingly unwild about the wild west, at least as it appears on film – its tropes are so grounded in moral justice that we never have to worry about postmodern disorientation, about disorientating pastiche. There is no tornado of meaninglessness undoing the causality that our narrative so stridently achieved (as we saw in the closing of A SERIOUS MAN). In TRUE GRIT, a tornado is just a bunch of air, swirling wildly, kicking up dust. And we know, as we always know, that when the sandstorm calms and the clouds part, the bad guy will be shot dead, the Baby will be born, the Law will be restored to the Land of Opportunity. Words will have meaning again and will be capitalized accordingly.