True Grit

Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2010 film follows fourteen year old Mattie Ross, who hires federal marshal Cogburn to hunt her father’s killer. The brothers refuse the word remake: they never rewatched the John Wayne picture, were not interested enough, and lifted from Charles Portis’s novel. The difference shows at the close. The 1969 film heals Mattie’s arm, kills LaBoeuf and sends Cogburn back to visit her. The Coens restore the book: the arm is amputated, and Mattie, arriving twenty five years on, learns Cogburn is already dead. The dialogue carries almost no contractions. Ethan Coen has said they were told the formality matched period speech. The linguist Mark Liberman measured contraction rates in Tom Sawyer, from 1876, and found the decade far from contractionless. The stiffness is style, not a recording. The film took ten nominations at the 83rd Academy Awards and won none: Best Picture, Directing, Actor in a Leading Role, Actress in a Supporting Role, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Costume Design, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. John Wayne won Actor in a Leading Role as Rooster Cogburn in 1969. Jeff Bridges, in the same part, did not. A good fit if you can take every line in that ceremonial, contraction free register. Not for anyone expecting the reckoning as the finale; the last stretch shows its cost.