Matt Damon gives a great performance. (Wilson Webb)
When it was announced that Joel and Ethan Coen were set to remake John Wayne’s greatest movie, “True Grit,” it heralded a culture clash of the titans, as if U2 were to hold a jam-off with Beethoven, or Annie Leibovitz were a finalist against Renoir in “Portraiture With the Stars.”
It isn’t much of a contest: The clear winner is John Wayne, because the Coens are playing his game. The Duke couldn’t do the Coens’ sly in-jokes, but they’ve never been able to reach out and move the audience to heights of emotion. Before now, they’ve never tried.
In 1880s Arkansas, 14-year-old Mattie Ross hires Marshal Rooster Cogburn to lead her on a a horseback journey into lawless lands in search of the desperado who killed her father. Together with LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), the clueless Texas Ranger who wants the murderer, Tom Chaney, for an unrelated crime, they encounter death and commotion, extracting clues from outlaws and corpses as their mutual respect grows.
Damon does some of the best acting of his career here: Everything about LaBoeuf feels soft, from his suede coat to his fluffy mustache and the jingle-bell sound of his shiny spurs. Yet this sagebrush oaf — Mattie calls him a “rodeo clown” — becomes fully human as Damon locates the professionalism and wounded pride of a man who might be able to control his self-serving prattle if only everyone would stop making fun of him.
The not-even-fat Jeff Bridges’ take on the “one-eyed fat man” Cogburn, though, isn’t so much a grizzled outlaw-hunter as a high-functioning hobo with a violent streak. If he isn’t quite as odd as Marlon Brando playing Fletcher Christian as a shrill fop in the remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” he comes close.
He and Josh Brolin (who plays the desperado Tom Chaney as an addled doofus) aren’t acting in the same movie as the serenely earnest newcomer, Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the Biblically vengeful Mattie with stark, unsentimental determination. Bridges and Brolin are working for laughs, whereas Wayne was just funny.
If they were a little less actorly, it would be easier to revel in the immense pleasures of that euphonious speech from Charles Portis’ novel: “The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn, a pitiless man, double tough, fear don’t enter into his thinking.” The Coens’ love of language runs at least as deep as their visual sense, and at times the verbosity produces a rhythm to equal the Coens’ screwball comedy “The Hudsucker Proxy.”
Though the remake is shorter than the original, several scenes of low comedy and slapstick could have been cut. Rooster has words with a dentally obsessed oddball covered entirely in a bearskin, and, in an unfunny scene with LaBoeuf, wastes several minutes of our time using pieces of cornbread for target practice. The Coens don’t do enough to maintain a Biblical thread — the movie begins with an epigraph from Proverbs — in a world of such cruelty and mystery that the only possible sense to be made of it must be left to divinity.
Yet the purity of Steinfeld’s ability to convey Mattie’s guileless sense of justice gives the film plenty of emotional ballast, particularly in the last 20 minutes or so. The final act blooms with sublime photography and music (by Roger Deakins and Carter Burwell, respectively), as the story settles on Rooster and Mattie’s will to stay alive. Not coincidentally, we don’t hear much from Bridges down the stretch. His nightclub-comic’s idea of a raspy drunkard’s voice would break the spell if we had to listen to him as he and Mattie struggle across a cracked and bitter moonscape.
This is the Coens at their finest — as is an earlier scene in which a dying man looks forward to “walking the streets of glory” — but they, and Bridges, find it difficult to do anything without a raised eyebrow, a dash of quirk, the postmodern nudge-nudge.
The Duke’s G-rated “True Grit” — which won its star an Oscar even as the X-rated “Midnight Cowboy” was crowned Best Picture — was the last shotgun blast of the old Hollywood as it expired with a defiant roar at the hippies, the druggies and the ironists. Its director, Henry Hathaway, was born in 1898. Courage and adventure were enough for him — straight up, no chaser. Joel and Ethan Coen can’t resist tossing in a superfluous twist of lemon.
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com