TRUE GRIT

I saw the new movie in December and loved it, so of course I had to check out the book. My favorite things about the film had been (a) the fact that Mattie Ross is such a total badass and (b) the quirky, highly stylized dialogue, and I was curious whether those elements came from the Coen brothers or the book’s author, Charles Portis. I was further interested to discover that the book was published in 1968 and not, as one might figure for the source material of a John Wayne western, the 1940s or something—in other words, it was a brand-new bestseller when it was first adapted for film.

It turns out that, except for a few Coenish touches (the man in the bear suit, LaBoeuf’s tongue injury) and minor plot streamlining, the movie is very faithful to the book (apparently much more so than the John Wayne version, which I haven’t seen, but just reading the “differences from the novel” section of the Wikipedia article made me all twitchy) and does a great job of capturing its major appeal, which is Mattie’s dogged, stoic, idiosyncratic narrative voice. (That voice and the quintessentially American odyssey it relates both reminded me strongly of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which then got me to thinking that as a quick, action-packed read with a strong 14-year-old heroine, I’m surprised no one’s touted this book as a rediscovered potential YA classic. It’s obviously intended for adults, but I think it could also have broad crossover appear for teens. I might have gotten into westerns earlier if I’d read it at that age.) Not surprisingly, since it gives us Mattie’s first-person tale in unadulterated form, the book is even better than the movie, bleak, poignant, and hilarious by turns (Ed Park’s great Believer article about Portis quotes Roy Blount, Jr., as saying that Portis “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny”).

Side note: I had to laugh the other day when I read some Oscar-related article griping that Jeff Bridges wore his Rooster Cogburn eye patch on the “wrong side” in the 2010 film—meaning the opposite eye that Wayne had worn it on in the 1969 version. Not only is the 2010 movie most emphatically not a remake of the earlier one, just a different adaptation of the same source material, but one of the things I specifically noticed while reading the book was that Cogburn doesn’t even have an eye patch in it! He’s only described as a “one-eyed man,” and Mattie mentions the appearance of his bad eye, so it’s clearly not covered. Obviously, it’s far easier for an actor to strap on an eye patch than change his eye, so I can see why Wayne’s patch was added, but the Coens might have done it with special effects and still chose the eye patch, which I can only assume means that the image of Wayne as Cogburn has become too indelible to mess around with—especially since the Coens also chose an actor who, like Wayne, was in his 60s, when in the book Cogburn is 40ish (albeit out of shape for his age; in one of my favorite quotes, Mattie describes him as “built along the lines of Grover Cleveland”).