Duke v. Dude?

When word first came out that Joel and Ethan Coen were making a movie from Charles Portis' 1968 novel True Grit, there was quite a bit of mumbling and grumbling. See, that book had been filmed once already, about a year after it was published, and there was the little problem that one of the roles had been played very well by a well-known actor that made it difficult to imagine a new person taking on the role. Movie fans everywhere wondered: Just how in the heck was Matt Damon supposed to fill the shoes of Glen Campbell as Texas Ranger La Boeuf?

Not really, of course. The big question was how would the laid-back Jeff Bridges take on a role indelibly defined by John Wayne? United States Marshal Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn is, in the minds of most Western movie fans, John Wayne. It's the only role that ever netted Wayne an Oscar, even if a lot of people felt it was more of a career-honoring award than one that the role itself earned him. And Wayne's work as Cogburn cemented the most enduring dimension of his image -- a gruff, middle-aged tough guy who lived, died, fought and sometimes when necessary killed according to his own code of personal honor.

But the Coens decided to focus more on the Portis novel than the Henry Hathaway-directed movie, and the novel is much more centered on Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old daughter of a murdered man who hires Cogburn to track his killer into Indian Territory. They can make that move because they don't have John Wayne in their movie; long before the time Wayne made True Grit in 1969 it was next to impossible to keep any movie starring him from becoming a "John Wayne movie." 1969's Mattie, Kim Darby, wouldn't have been up to that challenge even if she'd tried.

2010's Mattie, Hailee Steinfeld, can handle the screen with Bridges and Damon (and might have managed with Wayne). She convincingly brings Mattie's unyielding views of right and wrong to the screen as well as her refusal to accept defeat in any situation. Damon's La Boeuf is a little bit of a fop and a dandy at first but shows his own grit as the story moves on.

The make-or-break question of the movie, of course, is how Jeff Bridges, the Dude of the Coens' The Big Lebowski, measures up to the Duke. The answer is, pretty well, mostly because he never tries to sell himself as John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn. Bridges is 61, well old enough to have watched Wayne achieve icon status. And as the son of Lloyd Bridges, a tough-guy actor himself who spent a lot of the 1930s and 40s toiling away in the same kind of B-level westerns and war moves where Wayne got his start, Jeff Bridges probably has an appreciation for the "Old Hollywood" of his father, Wayne and others that not many current actors might share. So he never tries to inhabit it, playing Rooster as if the character had never been on screen before. It's a wise choice and it succeeds.

John Wayne's Rooster was more or less John Wayne with an eyepatch. Bridges' Rooster is his own character, and Bridges handles him excellently, whether he's being a broken-down ne'er-do-well with a badge or a ruthless killer. The first minutes of Bridges' Cogburn are almost warm and fuzzy; he gets curmudgeonly laughs testifying in court, he can't quite roll his own cigarettes and he's stuck living behind a grocery store. But the first time he draws his gun, his menace springs into sharp focus and his one eye holds more ice than any other two might manage.

In choosing to hold more closely to the Portis novel and its centering on Mattie, the Coens offer what is probably a much more definitive filmed version of that book. They wisely chose to not compete with the 1969 movie, just as Bridges wisely chose to not compete with Wayne. Because even if the Coens' movie is a definitive onscreen version of the novel True Grit, the definitive Reuben J. Cogburn still belongs to one Marion Mitchell Morrison. Fortunately there is room for both.

PS to the Warren Theatres: If you're going to use it to show something like Little Fockers, you really can't call it a "Grand" Auditorium anymore.