101 Ways to Win an Oscar
The Films That Tick All The Boxes
(2011)
Dir: Joel and Ethan Cohen
To all ‘Friends of Dorothy’ out there, I must apologise for the following review.
No, it’s not a raging, hate-filled rant against homosexuality; but rather the opinion that Judy Garland’s yellow brick road-skipping Dorothy has been replaced at the top of the ‘Great Movie Child’ category. Don’t act surprised. It was always likely to happen one day. What has kept her on top has been the sheer level of nauseating sprogs and whiny adolescents that have graced our screens in the decades that followed. But finally someone has stepped up to the plate. And that someone is 14-year old Hailee Steinfield.
In the Cohen’s True Grit, a remake of the John Wayne-starring 1969 original, Steinfield is Mattie Ross, a young girl who enlists the help of a grizzled old U.S Marshal to help her track down her father’s killer.
Steinfeld’s performance is quite extraordinary. At the slender age of fourteen she achieves the unthinkable task of acting her fellow cast members off the screen. You might think that’s all well and good, but considering her cohorts include such heavyweights as Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and the underrated Barry Pepper, it become a little more impressive. Upon an initial viewing, you would be excused for thinking Steinfeld just another babyfaced twenty-five year old, as her performance carries more maturity than a thousand Ben Stiller movies, and more dignity than a million Jennifer Anniston vom(it)-com vehicles.
Really the only performance I can think of that was almost as impressive in recent years was Natalie Portman’s portrayal of the wayward Mathilda in Luc Besson’s brilliant 1995 thriller Leon. Interestingly enough, Portman’s performance for Black Swan this year has been the one gaining all the plaudits. But Mathilda still acts like a child - albeit an extremely disturbed child shacking up with an illiterate hitman - whereas Mattie Ross is a girl in a man’s world, and has to adjust her behaviour accordingly. Her scenes with one local businessman are a particular delight.
To place her performance in context, the entire cast excel, with Bridges at his entertaining best, incomprehensibly growling and groaning his way through Rooster Cogburn’s dialogue in a much less annoying fashion than John Wayne ever did; whilst Matt Damon’s wonderfully named LaBoeuf goes from mysterious stranger to annoying prat to conquering hero with effortless ease in the space of a few hours.
In terms of its sheer performances, True Grit is right up there with recent titans such as The Social Network and Winter’s Bone. But it’s a Western after all, and the Coen’s love them a good ol’ Western, so it looks amazing. Aside from one rather dodgy closing ‘Green Screen’ horse riding sequence, it’s a joy to look at throughout.
It only came out in February, but I’d be amazed if it wasn’t on ‘Best of Year’ lists by the time December 31st rolls around.
**** ½ / *****
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Alas, the appeal of the Western has always eluded me. The same old duff nonsense assaulting my senses for ninety minutes straight, no thanks. The films are so damn near intolerable to me that I find my fight or flight reflex is switched on and so off I run, snarling like a wolf that has just got kicked in the nut sack.
As you can probably tell, I take the stand that if you’ve seen one Western, then you’ve basically seen them all. You’ve seen every single one that was ever made and that will ever be made and that’s that true to the point of ad nauseum.
“Yee hah motherfuckers.”
So it was with some reluctance and only because I’d been hearing so many great things about it that I went in to see True Grit. I ventured in not really knowing what to expect and you know what I found? It’s only about the best bloody film I’ve seen in ages. The entire film gave off an air of immaculate brilliance. The cast make the script come alive. The sounds and pictures are rendered onto the screen so vibrantly that the essence of the old West is somehow tolerable to me. The sort of atmosphere that justifies using the word epic or panoramic is what we see and hear. The film might well belong to a genre that has been done to death a 1000 times before but I simply couldn’t care less. The weight of brilliance buoys it up so much that all the prior animosity in the world couldn't sink it. The Coens have actually achieved the seemingly impossible. They’ve made a Western that I actually care about.
Perhaps it was to be expected that they would one day. After all, they’ve already made a career out of making films that encapsulate the modern West with such gems as No Country for Old Men (technically a period piece, as it’s set in 1980) and especially the film Raising Arizona, which remains to this day to be one of my all time favourite films in any genre. The point to make here is that a successful translation to the old West was by no means going to be a piece of cake for them. Indeed it is a testament to the performance of Hailee Steinfield in the role of Mattie that the film succeeds in the way it has done. The technical execution of the Coens alone would have counted for nothing was it not for the spellbinding performance that she gives at the heart of this movie. The assured maturity she brings to her character contrasts with her understandable naivety so charmingly that as a result you find yourself warming to this character that might otherwise have appeared truly obnoxious and annoyingly bratty throughout.
So then, the hours passed by soothingly enough and I came out of the screening room blinking into the light with a changed attitude to the old West. Well sort of. It’s changed a little in any case. I still feel that all Westerns are kind of the same but at least now I can see that sometimes a film can be so damn terrific that it just reverses years of pent up revulsion and bile in an instant and that’s a glorious thing to happen. Now, I can see some of the appeal that I never had before, which can only be a good thing. The only genre that is left to fall is the dreaded, god-awful musical….
Anyway, here’s a random digression to finish on. I know that they are spelled differently and so perhaps they are pronounced differently but take a good look at the surnames – LaBeouf and LaBouef. Now don’t tell me that the one that actually looks closer to La beef is not pronounced that way. Considering the popularity of this film, I’m thinking that this might soon be brought up in Shia’s presence an awful lot.
****3/4 /*****
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