If the 2010 film seems low on Coen brothers flavour, I believe it is at least partly because that flavour is inseparable from a faithful rendering of Portis’ authorial voice. The original 1968 novel True Grit by Charles Portis is rife with irony, black humour, arbitrary violence, idiosyncratic verbiage, and esoteric allusions. True Grit may be among the Coens’ least archetypal films, but it is also one of their best and a masterclass in literary adaptation – one which could not have been achieved if the brothers’ style was not so well-suited to the source material. Adding in the fact that it is one of the Coens’ few adaptations, it is easy to label True Grit a solid but unoriginal effort. At first glance, True Grit lacks the quirks and postmodern touches that define the brothers’ style in the popular imagination, and instead plays as a straight, even traditional, western. This is, perhaps, because it is not particularly “Coenesque”. It’s well-respected in the Coen canon but doesn’t seem to be many people’s favourite. Ten years on from its release, True Grit has settled firmly into the middle ground of Joel and Ethan Coen’s filmography.
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