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The Cohen Brothers' True Grit is a great movie, far superior to the John Wayne original - although before I saw the movie, I'd have said that was impossible.
Except for one thing...
It's based on a novel written in 1968 that, in the tradition of Edith Wharton, wholly sacrifices its characters in the service of its metaphor.
Just as Lily Bart is inexorably trapped in the machinery of Edith Wharton's plot so that not even God himself can save her from her necessary destruction, proud, spunky, whip-smart Mattie Ross must be humbled by time.
I didn't realize, watching Kim Darby all those years ago, breasts-strapped down, hair in a ridiculously anachronistic bob, that in the Charles Portis novel, Mattie loses her arm to the snakebite.
In the Cohens' film, and I assume in the novel, the story ends with Mattie in late middle age; all her brightness and spunk - her grit - has calcified. She's grown into a hard, one-armed spinster with an acid tongue. Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn - two busted up relicts of past age.
Portis is fairer with his heroine than Wharton - who grinds Lily down with a mechanical precision that lacks the authentic messiness of life - and I could see, watching the Cohens' film, how Mattie's adolescent moral certitude could harden into narrow-mindedness, her sense of entitlement change to bitterness and dissatisfaction at a world that never quite lived up to her standards, how her intelligence and independence, faced with a new disability, could turn into an isolating sort of pride. I could see the girl in the spinster and that is a credit to the film and the novel but it is also awful mean. Such a wasted life.
The Western Canon is stuffed with stories of Boy Kings and heroic bildungsroman of preternaturally and precociously gifted youth who go into the world in times of great hardship and return to acclaim to impart the wisdom of their experience to their community. From Achilles to Arthur to Luke Skywalker the story is so common and so accepted it is considered the template for all adventure stories. Women have far fewer young heroes to inspire. Mattie Ross is one such and she is ill-used in return for her grit.
Thankfully, where canon fails, fandom steps in. SarahT on Dreamwidth has written an absolutely stunning AU that looks more hopefully on Mattie's future while staying true to the character: There Are No Rodeo Clown in Yell County.
Except for one thing...
It's based on a novel written in 1968 that, in the tradition of Edith Wharton, wholly sacrifices its characters in the service of its metaphor.
Just as Lily Bart is inexorably trapped in the machinery of Edith Wharton's plot so that not even God himself can save her from her necessary destruction, proud, spunky, whip-smart Mattie Ross must be humbled by time.
I didn't realize, watching Kim Darby all those years ago, breasts-strapped down, hair in a ridiculously anachronistic bob, that in the Charles Portis novel, Mattie loses her arm to the snakebite.
In the Cohens' film, and I assume in the novel, the story ends with Mattie in late middle age; all her brightness and spunk - her grit - has calcified. She's grown into a hard, one-armed spinster with an acid tongue. Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn - two busted up relicts of past age.
Portis is fairer with his heroine than Wharton - who grinds Lily down with a mechanical precision that lacks the authentic messiness of life - and I could see, watching the Cohens' film, how Mattie's adolescent moral certitude could harden into narrow-mindedness, her sense of entitlement change to bitterness and dissatisfaction at a world that never quite lived up to her standards, how her intelligence and independence, faced with a new disability, could turn into an isolating sort of pride. I could see the girl in the spinster and that is a credit to the film and the novel but it is also awful mean. Such a wasted life.
The Western Canon is stuffed with stories of Boy Kings and heroic bildungsroman of preternaturally and precociously gifted youth who go into the world in times of great hardship and return to acclaim to impart the wisdom of their experience to their community. From Achilles to Arthur to Luke Skywalker the story is so common and so accepted it is considered the template for all adventure stories. Women have far fewer young heroes to inspire. Mattie Ross is one such and she is ill-used in return for her grit.
Thankfully, where canon fails, fandom steps in. SarahT on Dreamwidth has written an absolutely stunning AU that looks more hopefully on Mattie's future while staying true to the character: There Are No Rodeo Clown in Yell County.