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The Coen brothers weren't going to improve on the original adaptation of Charles Portis' book, the wonderful 1969 film starring Kim Darby and John Wayne. They just weren't. But perhaps they thought it was worth updating anyway, both to give it a little more realism and to restore the hard truths of the novel. Well, it is grittier, and it does end the way the book did; otherwise, it's the same thing, only less entertaining. Precocious fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires trigger-happy Federal Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track the man who killed her father, figuring either to kill him or bring him back to face justice. They're joined by a brash young Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) who is after the same man for an entirely different murder. The first time we hear Cogburn, he's in an outhouse. There's nothing wrong with that -- except that it warns us that realism isn't necessarily a virtue. Bridges speaks as though he still has the memory of marbles in his mouth, and Damon, after nearly having his tongue severed, speaks pretty much as he did before. Steinfeld just talks a lot. They all speak in the formalized way of the characters in the novel, as if the Coen brothers failed to realize that what made sense for a book written in Mattie's voice didn't make so much sense for a movie with actors playing the individual parts. For all that, this isn't a bad movie -- it retains some of the humor of the original and the book on which it's based, and the story itself is good -- but the drearier tone combined with characters who aren't as likable make it noticeably less enjoyable.
The Coen brothers weren't going to improve on the original adaptation of Charles Portis' book, the wonderful 1969 film starring Kim Darby and John Wayne. They just weren't. But perhaps they thought it was worth updating anyway, both to give it a little more realism and to restore the hard truths of the novel. Well, it is grittier, and it does end the way the book did; otherwise, it's the same thing, only less entertaining. Precocious fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) hires trigger-happy Federal Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track the man who killed her father, figuring either to kill him or bring him back to face justice. They're joined by a brash young Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) who is after the same man for an entirely different murder. The first time we hear Cogburn, he's in an outhouse. There's nothing wrong with that -- except that it warns us that realism isn't necessarily a virtue. Bridges speaks as though he still has the memory of marbles in his mouth, and Damon, after nearly having his tongue severed, speaks pretty much as he did before. Steinfeld just talks a lot. They all speak in the formalized way of the characters in the novel, as if the Coen brothers failed to realize that what made sense for a book written in Mattie's voice didn't make so much sense for a movie with actors playing the individual parts. For all that, this isn't a bad movie -- it retains some of the humor of the original and the book on which it's based, and the story itself is good -- but the drearier tone combined with characters who aren't as likable make it noticeably less enjoyable.
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