Review of True Grit (2010) by Shiira — 08 Jan 2011

The original "True Grit", directed by Henry Hathaway, and starring, no less than "The Duke" himself, made its initial theatrical run in 1969, just two years after Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" blew away the production code.

Once Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway went down spasmodically in a hail of gunfire, that was that, and there would be blood forevermore. No more smuggling. The days of "beating around the bush" were over.

No more fade to black. You could "hump the hostess". In Elia Kazan's "Baby Doll", released in 1956, smack dab in the middle of a sexually repressed era, the handcuffed filmmaker somehow managed to adapt "27 Wagons Full of Cotton", the Tennessee Williams play that depicted a middle-aged man's eroticization of his underage wife, without getting arrested on indecency charges.

While neither Archie Lee(Karl Malden) nor Silva(Eli Wallach) get anywhere near first base with the titular character(Carroll Baker) in the official narrative, the first generation Italian does have implied sex with her, twice, suggested by a phallic symbol in one instance, and the cotton baron's dry humping performance(while mounted on her hobby horse) in another.

Whereas "Baby Doll" predictably focuses on the man's needs, and likewise, in the John Wayne vehicle, LaBoeuf's libido is on display when he expresses his wish to kiss Mattie Ross(Kim Darby), this seemingly square western, with the utmost subtlety, delves into the fourteen-year-old girl's growing pains, in which her crush on the Texas Ranger runs deeper than the stealing glances she aims his way at the boarding house dinner table.

When LaBoeuf inquires Mattie about her name, the young girl excuses herself from his company and adjourns to bed. Away from the menfolk, the recently bereaved girl and the boarding house owner gab about the strapping young lad, both agreeing, do the smitten pair, that the federal marshal is handsome.

Before the lights are turned out, the girl cries, the waterworks being attributed to her slain father, no doubt, but also, perhaps, out of guilt, for feeling the first pangs of lust. Suggested by the snake pit she later falls into, in all likelihood, Mattie touched herself.

There's a sin involved, but it can't be murder, since Cheney(Jeff Corey) is still breathing after the recoil due to Mattie's firing, which only grazes his head, so the snake bite that the girl endures must correspond to some earlier transgression.

(Rooster Cogburn kills Cheney. John Wayne has to be the hero, even a deeply flawed one.) In the remake, Mattie pays for the self-induced orgasm with her hand. Seen as an adult, the moviegoer can't help but perceive Mattie's missing appendage as a scarlet limb.

Unlike the original, it's Cogburn(Jeff Bridges) whom Mattie(Hailee Steinfeld) admires, initially anyways, as indicated by her divulgence to LaBoeuf(Matt Damon) that she had chosen the wrong man. Bridges' rendering of the one-eyed marshal contains none of the inappropriate feelings that may have stirred in his predecessor's heart.

As Mattie bandages the Texas Ranger's hand at the McAllister homestead, Cogburn appears miffed by her charity. Why? Does he have sex on his mind? Maybe. Because Darby was twenty-two at the time, to a certain extent, "True Grit" could get away with its pedophilic undertones.

Conversely, Steinfeld is age-appropriate, so when Damon repeats Campbell's line about stealing kisses, he comes across more strongly as a child molester. The filmmaker leaves out Wayne's original comment about LaBoeuf "enjoying it too much"; the Texan's spanking of Mattie's behind, probably out of fear that the hunting party would resemble some sort of unseemly threesome, a malodorous "Jules & Jim" playing wet nurse to a lolita.

Ultimately, the most striking feature about this otherwise well-dressed mounting of the ultimate John Wayne experience("The Searchers" was John Ford's bag) is its political incorrectness, or rather, the arch self-awareness that many westerns were shameless in their depiction of Native Americans.

Right away, "True Grit" announces itself as the anti-"Dances with Wolves", in which an Indian's speech is cut-off by the executioner's hooding of the tribesman, disturbingly enough, to comic effect, just before he dangles at the public hanging.

Later, at the site of an abandoned house, the liquored up law officer kicks two small "red-skinned" children off from the structure's wooden foundation without any protestation from his female companion.

(Mattie names her horse Blackie in front of a "Negro" stable-boy.) In another sense, Mattie loses her fingers because she didn't lift a single finger to stop the needless cruelty of those innocents.