TRUE GRIT

28/2/11, Curzon Soho

110 mins. The Coen Brothers' remake of the John Wayne classic with Jeff Bridges in place of the Duke. A great, laconic performance by Bridges and some lovely, drily witty lines from the Coens. But by their standards a disappointing film.

It is after all a Western and we all know the story, which is a given. There were some Coen-esque moments, like the discovery of a corpse hanging high up in a tree in the wilderness ("Why did they hang him so high?" "Perhaps that way they thought he'd be more dead") which is cut down, sold to a passing Indian and then turns up having been sold on to a huge man in a bear skin who, having removed the teeth, offers to sell it back to our heroes. There were a couple of lovely comic scenes involving the heroine (Hailee Steinfeld, who really was just 14 when they made the film) and the elderly dealer in horseflesh with whom she negotiates. And the conclusion was typically downbeat: our heroine, now grown-up, seeks out her saviour, who has become one of the attractions in a touring Western show, only to find he has died a few days before her arrival. Matt Damon once again showed what a good actor he is as La Boeuf (pron "Labeef"), the effete Texas Ranger.

But there were some longueurs and I'm not sure it was a good idea to write the whole script in clunky period dialogue, full of "is not" instead of "isn't" and "I will" instead of "I'll". In the end the Western has rules which even the Coens must obey. One, which doesn't help plausibility, is that our heroes make camp with an array of equipment which in reality would have needed at least one packhorse to carry, yet which they somehow manage to stow away in a couple of saddle-bags. The most glaring example comes towards the end when the heroine goes down to the river to get water and spots and is spotted by the man they've been chasing as he waters the gang's horses on the far side. She has a wooden bucket, which floats away in close-up: a bucket which has earlier been nowhere in evidence on her horse or Jeff Bridges'.

The Coens are good at subverting genre expectations with black and quirky humour, but the Western seems to defy even them.

A SERIOUS MAN

27/11/09, Barbican


The Coen Brothers' latest. A social satire, a bleak comedy, not violent (except for one brief and shocking scene, part of our hero's nightmare, in which his idiot brother is shot by the redneck neighbours while attempting to escape in a canoe to Canada), but very black.


Michael Stuhlbarg (who is apparently a hot, Tony Award-winning New York stage actor who seems to have done very few movies) plays Larry Gopnik, a Minnesota maths professor in 1967 whose life falls apart. His wife announces she's leaving him for an oleaginous friend and throws him out; his teenage son is smoking pot and running away from the class bully and dope dealer to whom he owes $20 he can't pay, while insisting Dad fix the TV aerial so he can watch F-Troop; his hopeless brother Arthur is sleeping on the couch and getting into trouble with the authorities for gambling (and homosexuality?); he is being harrassed by the Columbia Record Club for payments on records he hasn't ordered (his son did). The official synopsis continues:


"While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry's chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person -- a mensch -- a serious man?"


This is the world of the Coen's own youth, lovingly recreated. The whole thing is a shaggy dog story which, just as things seem to be looking up (Sy Ableman is killed in a car crash, Larry's wife returns, his son gets his confiscated cassette player complete with Jefferson Airplane tape and $20 back from a senile rabbi, the third of the ones Larry tries to consult, Larry gets tenure) his doctor rings to tell him the X-ray we saw him having near the start of the film has shown something truly alarming.

It begins with a shaggy dog story: in 19th century Poland a traveller brings home an old man his wife insists is a dybbuk; the wife stabs the visitor; the visitor laughs, apparently unaffected, then rises to leave a couple of minutes later just as a blood stain starts to appear on his shirt front. So is he a dybbuk or not? We never find out.

And in the middle of the film is another wonderful shaggy dog story, told by the second rabbi, about a dentist who finds Hebrew letters spelling out the phrase "Help me" etched, out of sight, on the teeth of one of his (gentile) patients. Trying to solve the mystery drives the dentist bananas: he goes to the rabbi; the rabbi in effect tells him to forget it. The dentists recovers. Larry, who has gone to the rabbi himself for advice about his predicament and is sitting in the exact same chair as the dentist, asks about the teeth: "Who cares?" says the rabbi. From which I take it that the ways of God are impenetrable to man and that worrying about it only makes us unhappy. When Larry asks for concrete advice and puts forward some suggestions the only one that gets a positive response from the rabbi is trying to more good in the world: "Doing good? Can't hurt," the rabbi says.

Self-consciously clever, often funny, thought-provoking.