alohabetty replied to your post: TRUE GRIT Is an Interesting Exercise That Never Really Turns into a Real Movie

I was disappointed, too. Probably because I also wanted to love it. Having never seen the original movie (or read the book - I know, I suck), I liked Jeff Bridges’ in his role. He at least made me laugh. The rest fell flat for me.

There is a danger inherent in adapting a book too faithfully for the screen: what works in a literary context doesn’t necessarily work in a cinematic one.  The makers of the original film understood this.  The Coens do not.  A movie is not a book.  That’s why the first Harry Potter film is the worst: they followed the childish, episodic nature of the first book so slavishly, they forgot to make a good movie with an urgent narrative.

One of the best modern examples of successful novel adaptation is the film L.A. Confidential.  The book was considered to be “unadaptable”, so the screenwriters set themselves to quite a chore: gutting the book down to the quick, the most essential plot points, the most essential characters.  People live who die in the book, and vice-versa.  Dialog is given to other characters.  Whole subplots are cleanly cut out.  One of the major characters, who in the novel is killed off almost as an aside, is in the movie given a death intrinsic to the plot, with the whole “Rollo Tomasi” business, which the screenwriters invented from whole cloth.  It is a masterwork of novel adaptation, and such a sterling job that James Ellroy himself loves it and claims is as a perfect couterpart to his original book.

The adapters of True Grit back in the late 60’s understood that the meat of the story is Rooster Cogburn’s redemption and unlikely bond with an extraordinary young woman, and they played to those elements in the script, making for a more fun, more emotionally affecting, and plain more exciting story.  The Coens, on the other hand, gave us an adaptation almost afraid of changing a word of the text, producing a meandering, anti-climactic, and frankly depressing movie.  Maybe they figured that they were so successful with their similarly faithful adaptation of No Country for Old Men that they should go the same route this time, but they were wrong, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that No Country was a story already very close to their own sensibilities.

I was excited to see the Coens tackle a Western.  In retrospect, I would have preferred an original script.  There were rumors of them working on an original, violent and mean Western script a couple years ago…I guess they gave up on that when True Grit appeared on their radar.  That’s too bad.  We could have had a new classic rather than a footnote to their career.