Fresh off the heels of Contagion, Steven Soderbergh delivers Haywire, a lean government spy story. What drives the film are its action sequences, driven by mixed martial arts star Gina Carano’s abilityto kick and jum and crush throats with her thighs. The film also reunites Soderbergh with writer Lem Dobbs, responsible for penning one of the director’s best films, The Limey. Like The Limey, Haywire is a bare-bones genre flick that depends on its ability to play with convention in a way that’s more reminiscent of Shoot the Piano Player than Pulp Fiction.

What I most admire about this mode of Soderbergh’s filmmaking is its approach to actors and their performances. The silver screen is a place where people best succeed when they play themselves: when Humphrey Bogart walks across a room, Anna Karina winks at the camera, or Bruce Willis creeps through an elevator shaft. Much the same is true of Carano: she’s not an actress, and even if she were, I doubt she would be a great one. Yet Soderbergh boiled down her performance to a competent and functional show that barely seems like a performance at all. Combined with the understated presence of veterans like Bill Paxton and Michael Douglas, the cast becomes a collection of compelling characters with a refreshing lack of prescribed depth.

Haywire also succeeds as a romp of the sexes, and I took particular delight in watching Carano annihilate a host of slimy male adversaries. Her fight with Michael Fassbender is especially funny; he delivers line familiar to women everywhere, “You’re out of control!” as she pummels him into submission. In our intertextual media universe, it’s all too possible that this is Fassbender’s sex-addict from Shame really getting some serious introspection handed to him. Haywire isn’t offering the feel-good empowerment delivered by the Kill Bill movies or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where sexuality appears as a uniquely feminine form of empowerment that’s appreciated by men and only tested when it goes head to head with other women. Whereas an overwritten character would have easily fallen into similar tired techniques, it is precisely the character’s lack of development and Carano’s subdued performance that make Mallory Kane a badass female unencumbered by an exhausting need for sympathy.

For all that’s made of the action, though, the film is more interested in unraveling mystery than the drama of a final showdown. Dobbs and Soderbergh know that by the time they’ve showed every card up their sleeves and Carano has unwrapped all the layers of her own betrayal, there will be no need for a final confrontation. The film ends just before Carano delivers her last dose of justice. Conventionally, it’s an unsatisfying ending. But not nearly as unsatisfying as it would have been to sit through a boring, drawn out finale.

Shame, dir. Steve McQueen (2011)

All of the stars were aligning for Shame to be my newest favorite film about destructive addiction.

I entered the theater with an enduring respect and trust for McQueen, and I had been nursing a relatively significant man-crush on Michael Fassbender for the past year. At the risk of sounding dismissive, Shame was overall disappointing, with jigsaw gems shining discreetly within an overly-fragmented narrative.

McQueen is most known for his style, which capitalizes on truthful cinematography and editing with slow gravitas and poise. It’s an eye that is unwaveringly serious and profound, which served him so beautifully in Hunger (McQueen, 2008). Shame, however, does not carry the historical and political drama of the Irish hunger strikes of 1981; Shame pales in comparison, meandering towards melodrama faster than tragedy. I’ll empathize faster with Bobby Sands than Brandon (Michael Fassbender), the wealthy new-yorker-sex-addict who tries to straighten his life out.

That’s not to say that there aren’t several profoundly cinematic moments built carefully into the film. One would be when Brandon’s trashy-yet-charming sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), sings a slow song in a high-rise bar where Brandon and his boss, David (James Badge Dale), watch. Mulligan’s pain dances behind a thin veil of sexuality as we watch her in an uncomfortably close and unwavering shot (which McQueen barely cut away from). It’s hypnotizing and powerful. Another occurs soon thereafter; the three end up at Brandon’s apartment, where Sissy and David lock themselves in Brandon’s bedroom and have sex in his bed. Brandon, with a visceral disgust, undresses, and just as the audience begins to contemplate the the revolting notion that he may be planning to join them, Brandon is in his running clothes out jogging the city streets at night. This jog lasts well over 5 minutes in a continuous take, and it is a well-needed breath for the audience.

There are many moments of beauty in Shame, but for me, the pieces didn’t come together in harmony. I can’t help but feel similarly to how I felt leaving Somewhere (Coppola, 2010). While the vision and pacing of a well-laid film appeared on the screen, the content couldn’t support its very careful presentation. My biggest reaction, overall, is how little I was able to care about Brandon’s situation. I engaged with the film more so on a clinical level than an emotional one; Shame is less of a character-study than a case-study.

Green Lantern, dir. Martin Campbell (2011)

Full disclosure: the Green Lantern is my favorite comic book hero.

So I’m giving Green Lantern the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of the heart, because it’s a rare film that refuses to cross the line into cheap gags and cynicism and this film refuses to do either. Most people who’ve seen it dismiss it as hokey, and just plain bad, but there seems to be a depth that Green Lantern aims for and, well, misses.

From what I’ve heard people find Green Lantern childish and, I’ll say it again, hokey, because of the Green Lantern’s power. It’s a ring that feeds off its wearer’s strength of will. The villain, Parallax, has power that feeds off of fear. The central question in the film is if willpower will overcome fear.  It’s a beautiful conflict that, unfortunately, never receives its full due.

I’m not a comic book guy – I don’t collect them, don’t really read them – though I did grow up with their mythologies as most who grew up at the end of the 20th Century inevitably did. Now, of course, they’ve exploded into a new direction with the comic book film adaptations. Most of these adaptations attempt to cover far too much content in one hundred and fifty minutes. What inevitably occurs is a narrative breakdown where character becomes sacrificed for CGI and plot. The core of the comic falls off that high cliff into fog like so many super-villains in the past. As Green Lantern‘s progresses, once Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) receives the ring and is introduced to the Green Lantern Corps, the film suffers from a complete narrative breakdown where we more or less are given episodes of Hal, Carol Ferris (Blake Lively, who basically plays the Serena van der Woodsen of the DC Universe), and the nebbish doctor-come-villain Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard, who, unfortunately, is forced to scream high-pitched squeals of pain in 90% of his scenes). The only continuity throughout Green Lantern stems from Parallax, a villain that grows stronger and threatens to destroy Oa, the CGI orgy that’s the Green Lantern Corps’ home planet, and later Earth. A lot has to be squeezed into one film and what inevitably happens is that almost all of it – the story, the performances, the action – gets shortchanged.

The most successful comic book adaptations seem to feature superheroes who are not completely dependent upon their power, i.e. Batman and Iron Man. These films seem to have less trouble examining the heros as characters; they’re less superheroes and more flawed individuals. The association of superpower and humanity is what makes the films interesting. The exemplary films - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Iron Man – play back and forth with this association flawlessly. But the problem with those particular heroes is that they’re not true superheroes: both Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark crafted their power and are, at base, regular guys. Superman ain’t human. The X-Men can’t wake up one day and decide to hang it all up. Spider Man shoots a web whether he likes it or not.

What about Green Lantern? He’s human. His ability is what I’ve always admired: all he has to do is be brave. Unfortunately, action sequences are what earn tickets, and director Martin Campbell spends much of his energy playing with 3D (very well) instead of giving us real meat when it comes to emotion.With the insufficient attention, Campbell treads into campiness trying to rush earnestness. We modern moviegoers are a cynical bunch and will laugh at anything with a speck of unearned enthusiasm. Hal does overcome his fear and becomes a Green Lantern but by the end we’re still unclear what exactly that means for Hal Jordan.

Terrence Malick has made five films in thirty-eight years. All of his films are recognized critically as masterpieces. Keeping with that tradition, his most recent film The Tree of Life won top honors at the Cannes film festival last month. Speaking about the film, head of the Cannes jury Robert DeNiro said, “It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize.” DeNiro’s offhand comment is invaluable to deciphering how this film has steadily risen, without much apparent consideration, to a respectable position within the pantheon of contemporary American filmmaking.

The movie is basically the story of Malick’s Texan youth in the 1950s, intercut with glossy meditations on the history of life on Earth. Sean Penn, playing the older version of the young boy we see constantly intimidated by his father (Brad Pitt), wanders awed and aimlessly through a gleaming present-day metropolis. There is a quiet voiceover, often whispered, presumably because only serious things are whispered. As with any of Malick’s films, bizarre moments are captured with a grace that makes them undeniably appealing. In one scene a band of young, directionless boys destructively wander the hinterlands of their hometown; a father intensely urges his son to hit him as the camera floats gently before their faces; children frolic in clouds of hazardous DDT.

What sets these sequences apart from the rest of the film is their total honesty. They don’t defer to clichéd images that stink of Planet Earth—they instead capture the weirdness of being young, the inanities of fatherhood, strange moments that are genuinely past. Even if these aren’t real memories, they’re still something known, something felt, something represented.

However, the elements of the film that haves garnered most praise, confusion, and appreciation are the sequences concerning the origins of life. These moments feature everything from the Big Bang to a heartwarming scene in which a CGI dinosaur spares his prey. O, glory! Yet, far from the objects of sublime, inimitable beauty these shots are intended to be, they seem hollow, generic, and clean. They have all the beauty of screensavers, commercials, stock photos.

But they’re enormous, and as such probably important (this is where DeNiro comes in). They’re set to an operatic score, yet this also seems like an overbearing way of emphasizing the gravitas of these generic yet supposedly beautiful images. When Stanley Kubrick set a classical score to shots of dancing space technology, he did it with a deft eye for irony and a comic sense that something so modern could be beautiful. Godard once claimed in an interview that Steven Spielberg had only shot Schindler’s List in black-and-white because, for Spielberg, black-and-white meant “serious.” Immediately, this comment came to mind watching Malick’s overproduced iconic imagery set to a classical score.

By the end of the film, though, I doubt many people are genuinely fooled by Malick’s sense of drama and eternity so large it becomes frequently hilarious instead of groundbreaking or awesome. For a film that supposedly grapples with humanities place in the cosmos, I came away learning little about anything, including the intention of Malick’s supposed metaphysical reflection. Rarely, though, is the American multiplex faced with a film like The Tree of Life. Yet despite being a project of unequaled ambition, it is important to note that ambition, importance, and size alone shouldn’t earn any gold stars or Palme D’ors. But in America, where bigger is better, we’ll take what we can get. Whatever you want to call it.

J.J. Abrams Super 8 is a movie banking on the nostalgia of the Spielberg era of innocent American filmmaking. It seeks to appeal, I gather, not necessarily to kids and teens looking to cool off and get some thrills, but instead to their parents, who remember with fondness ET and The Goonies. What makes Super 8 more successful than other recent kidcentric adventure movies, though, is not its relationship to Spielberg’s action-comedies and science fiction dramas—unless that relationship is understood primarily in terms of historical setting. The movie’s 1979 setting is not an accident, nor is it pure homage. Instead, it’s the only way J.J. Abrams could possibly make a movie that doesn’t involve little kids interacting with computers, cellular phones, and the other assorted technical artifacts that keep kids from actually doing interesting things on screen.

The children of Super 8 have the benefit of being allowed to ride bikes, break into buildings, sneak out of their houses and even escape from an air force holding tank. All this makes for an old-fashioned enjoyable two hours. Framing the escaped-alien narrative is the story of Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) fighting the pain of losing his mother and now forced to deal with his good-hearted but misguided father Jackson (Kyle Chandler), a role that allows Chandler to indulge fully in his penchant for authority figures with tight lips and strained eyes. Along the way, Joe finds young, somehow forbidden love with Alice (Elle Fanning).

The movie’s adventurous sequences and its treatment of a small town invaded by mysterious though obviously evil military men are entirely successful and enjoyable. Where Super 8 falters is in its added element of serious emotion that it can’t quite seem to pull off: Joe’s mother never seems honestly missed, the pain supposed to be conveyed by Joe’s father never really seems grounded, especially in his feud with local ne’er-do-well drunk Louis Dainard (Ron Eldard), also conveniently Alice’s father. What Abrams hopes will read as raw emotion seems like an unearned afterthought; at the end of the movie, when Joe finally lets go of his mother’s locket, it feels somehow cruel rather than redemptive.

Another place where Super 8 excels is in its deftly constructed (and never overbearing) back-story. Abrams’ always spot-on sense of conspiracy and history constructed by archives of documents and movies emerges here as a perfectly integrated element of the narrative. The same techniques Abrams used on his frequently trying television show Lost to create a sense of dizzying misunderstandings and absent explanations are here used to opposite effects: no loose ends here, only emotions that seem a little too clean cut. This, too, betrays the sense of nostalgia that characterizes the entire movie; it makes the kids seem more youthful, less jaded, more willing to accomplish the tasks that make a good adventure movie. But it also fails to understand the scope of their emotions: a scene in which one boy gets hurt so badly as to have a bone sticking out of his leg seems almost laughable, and even a drunken father’s alcoholic threats seem as false as Joe Lamb’s supposed mourning. What Abrams misses, I think, is that the past isn’t just a place for easy spelunking into reified feelings: despite a historical pedigree, they’re not fooling anyone.

Broadcast News, dir. James L. Brooks (1987)

Probably few of you remember this irritable writer complaining that The Criterion Collection had opted to release James L. Brooks’ 1987 Broadcast News instead of putting out “more Godard.” It seemed like a fair pronouncement at the time, one that few people would disagree with. Then I saw Broadcast News. The movie bears a lot of similarities to one of its male leads, the handsome yet moronic news anchor Tom Grunik (played by William Hurt in his inimitable lazy drawl). It’s an incredibly good-looking picture; one you’re not sure has a lot of depth, yet somehow irresistible all the same.

I reacted in a manner that I doubt would surprise James L. Brooks. Much like the other male lead, Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), I was bitter. Why does this movie get all the credit, for being charming and good-looking despite its obvious brainlessness? Meanwhile I’m slaving away thinking of all the different ways this movie is so stupid and no one cares about little old me. And you people love it! I’ll never forgive you for that! This is basically Altman’s reaction to his best friend Jane Craig (Holly Hunter) when she admits she has feelings for Tom. And it’s a bad one.

As the movie goes on, though, it becomes apparent that Tom Grunik has been playing everyone all along. He gets the big promotion, snags the best producer, snakes along to lead anchor. It’s been hard to notice, mostly because he’s managed to play dumb so well. But towards the end of the film, when his nemesis Aaron Altman’s perpetual cycle of self-pity has reached its apex, it becomes impossible not to realize that whatever authority was granted by his intelligence has been squandered by his unwillingness to do anything other than whine charmlessly.

For Broadcast News this realization has two meanings. First, it means that Broadcast News is vaguely enjoyable for the way in which it helps us to see that entitled people, no matter how deserving they may be, ultimately cannot escape being obnoxious (and thusly wholly unappealing, if not outright wrong). It’s like the experience of watching High Fidelity for the first time since you were 15: you realize John Cusack is really just an asshole. And I thank it for that. Second — and slightly more profound for me — is the realization the film offers for everyone who dislikes it but sits through it. Sure, James L. Brooks says, you may be half-heartedly mocking my film. But at the end of the day you’re still watching it along with everyone else and your cynicism has done nothing to encourage films you think people should be watching instead of Broadcast News. Your cynicism hasn’t even turned this DVD off.

By the time I finished watching Broadcast News I had kind of grown to like it. Holly Hunter is incredible and the film has a pleasant late 1980s Washington, D.C. look to it — think fat ties, boxy cars, concrete buildings. I had learned to take it less seriously, and in some sense I admired it. As a film, it certainly doesn’t realize the full aesthetic potential of its medium. What it managed to do, though, was illustrate how completely irritating it is to grouse. It showed me that at the end of the day there’s nothing charming about being upset all the time — both inside the film and out. That, somehow, made it more than worth my watching it.

Le Quattro Volte, dir. Michaelangelo Frammartino (2011)

When A. O. Scott says that a film “reinvents the very act of perception,” you listen.

Michaelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2011), is the most transfixing and profound narrative I have seen in years. The film structures itself around the four modes of transmigration (an ancient model of reincarnation); a soul wanders from man, to animal, to vegetable, to mineral. An old man trades his goats milk for dust swept up in a church in order to delay his death. Eventually he passes, and we follow his process of transmigration. For such a simple story (that has no dialogue whatsoever), it might seem odd to commend the writing, but any filmmaker that can weave a riveting story while forcing the viewer only to watch understands screenwriting in its truest form. The camera does all the talking.

The cinematography is disturbingly objective: think Robert Gardner without the narration. After the first cycle, you actually start to feel like a spirit, witnessing humanity as a species and people as animals. We scan around the old town up in the mountains; Andrea Locatelli’s camera is often perched on top of houses, hills, steeples. We’re not serenely floating as much as hovering, with a nagging feeling of menace; the next second we’re shocked by the most suffocatingly subjective camera–we are buried in the center of a pile of ash, sealed into a stone tomb or built into a wooden conflagration. In the final stage, we are released. We are smoke and ash. We sweep over the forest where his favorite tree was, we brush the field where his goats fed and we snake through his old mountain town.

What this film capitalizes on so successfully is the simple pleasure of watching. Much like the beginning of There Will Be Blood or Wall-E, it’s comforting when a director forces you to watch. It’s an act of confidence: “I know what I’m doing, just let me show you.” Its effect in Le Quattro Volte is that and more. There are only a few things in the film that place us in time; otherwise this story could have happened hundreds of years ago. In the terms of transmigration, it absolutely has. It’s happening all the time.

The Fighter, dir. David O. Russell (2010)

The most impressive thing about The Fighter is its dedication to media reenactment. For the film’s boxing matches the filmmakers looked not only to acquire the actual cameras on which those matches were filmed, they acquired the original HBO crews to recreate, shot for shot, Micky Ward’s fights. From my description, you might think that what emerges is something annoying in its quest for authenticity. Yet the performances—from Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Amy Adams—are so strong in their own right that they maintain aesthetic reenactments while steering clear of cheap imitation.

Watching the video reenactments of Ward’s fights is totally satisfying, from the weird horizontal flaring around the edges to Micky’s own shy variant on the famous rope-a-dope strategy. And because of the character’s own frustrations, I can’t express how badly I wanted him to come out, punches flying, and sweep the top. Though he wins, the film doesn’t really let him do it in style—unless that style so understated as to be rendered invisible. The moment of triumphant expiation I desired came without a full sense of triumph or expiation, which, like Wahlberg’s own muted performance, is much harder than it looks.

It’s still strange to watch a 90s period piece, mostly because the 90s weren’t really that long ago but they feel forever ago. The Fighter places the story of Micky Ward (Whalberg) and his brother, Dick Eklund (Bale), an already fallen-from-grace boxer who relives his famous fights in the haze of crack addiction, firmly in the dilapidated 90s (when everything really was ugly). The boys’ mother (Leo) is a money-hungry manager who probably loves Dicky more than Micky. The film missteps by not bringing her relationship with Micky into its own; instead, it stands as a corollary to the Micky-Dicky saga. Leo, a powerful actress, can’t be held back: when she’s not fully explored, the audience knows what they’re missing.

Whalberg gives us a memorable portrait of a boxer unable to tap into his inner rage; Ward never really speaks up, never really lets loose (even when he wins the title). It is this tension that drives the film. Holding everything back is as bold a performance as Bale’s relaxed in-control scene-stealing. Even his love affair with the tempting barwoman (Adams) reveals more about Ward’s inability to access his own inner passion than anything else. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Ward wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere without the antagonism provided by his family and his environment. One gets the feeling that, had he been able to relax in the ring, he wouldn’t have been able to fight at all.

What the film shows, too—without erring too far on the side of a heavy-handed lament—is the degree to which these forgotten (to me at least) brothers and their family lived the lives of local celebrities—and what it means to hold that strange moniker. Local celebrity in Lowell means a harem of sisters who ran into the ugly tree (people watch as they get in a fight with your new girlfriend), always watching the length of your mother’s skirt and the height of her heels, getting your hand broken by the cops. Dick Eklund is even the subject of an HBO documentary about crack addiction—which everybody sees, though it doesn’t matter because everybody’s already seen the family’s drama firsthand. The drama of The Fighter—which pushes it closer to Raging Bull than Rocky—is the drama of succeeding when everybody’s looking, and what it’s like to have everybody looking in the first place.

Somewhere, dir. Sofia Coppola (2010)

Richard Brody—a critic whom I respect—said of Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere that it was “One of the most radical films ever made in Hollywood, if the root of the cinema is the conjuring of inner life through outer particulars. The gap between the life lived and the life perceived—a quiet tragedy, Sartre-style—is traversed with the tender, near-weightless glide of a Ferrari on a freeway.” I thought about Brody’s assessment of the film for a long time after I saw it. Aside from being simple amazed with Brody’s coining of the term Sartre-style to refer to an aesthetic, I wondered if we could have seen the same film: I would hardly call Somewhere, with its by now clichéd neo-Antonioni visual metaphors strained through Stephen Shore cinematography, radical.

If anything, Somewhere is a restatement of a story we’ve seen and heard many times before—which doesn’t make it all that different from any other film, really. What makes Somewhere different is the degree to which it fails to assemble the familiar tropes and stylistics it has resuscitated into a successful film.

This film, more so than Marie Antoinette before it, makes a point of its flatness. The film’s representation of depressed action star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff, whose last name is the only appropriate adjective for his appearance) relies mainly on Coppola’s seeming unobtrusiveness. Marco moves through his world without even the possibility of the director—or the audience—entering his self, understanding his sadness, which is only revealed towards the end of the film. This, above all, is what differentiates Coppola from the filmmaker who I still hold as her greatest influence, the above-mentioned Antonioni. Antonioni used the power of the aesthetic relationship of characters to their surroundings as a viable method of entering their consciousness: it was a reflective relationship. Yet when Coppola tries to avoid this, by making Marco’s own sadness intangible, we end up with empty visual metaphors—him floating, aimlessly, in the pool of the Chateau Marmont—that draw nothing but knowing scoffs from an audience.

Somewhere does become more interesting when Coppola exploits her powerful ability to reveal the unsexy side of what is meant to be perceived as sexy. An early sequence—in which Johnny Marco watches two nervous, sad strippers from the comfort of his bed—fails only because Coppola breaks up the long shots of the girls with reverses to Marco’s face. The opportunity for the audience to contemplate what exactly makes the promise of sex so dauntingly unsexy is thrown away; instead, we’re made to watch Johnny Marco fall asleep.

The film’s most successful sequences involve the dynamic relationship between Marco and his daughter, Cleo (Elle Fanning). Fanning is in the film far too little: Coppola spends too much time illustrating Marco’s vapid, LA life before introducing Cleo. It’s time that’s simply wasted, since the whole premise of the film—watching, not entering, the character of Johnny Marco—really comes to mean that we already know the character. He doesn’t need to be defined beyond his initial appearance, stepping out of his Ferrari which he’s been driving in circles.  That first minute of Somewhere—alone—is far more satisfying to watch than Somewhere in its entirety.

True Grit,

My previous opinions on this blog can attest to my cagey relationship with the Coen Brothers. Some films—like The Big Lebowski—stand out as undeniably great, while others—anything from Miller’s Crossing to No Country for Old Men—seem a little too content with their supposed perfection for me to find them genuinely good. True Grit, though, appears to demonstrate a new direction for the Coen Brothers. I remember watching A Serious Man and thinking the only character in the film for which the Coens felt any semblance of genuine interest was the son. If he was the only character they cared about, why wasn’t he the focus of the film?

In True Grit—to which, I will readily admit, I was drawn because honestly who doesn’t want to see Jeff Bridges in everything at this point—the Coens manage to construct a film around a character for whom they genuinely care. The catch is that that character isn’t Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn; instead, it’s Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), the fourteen years aged Old West control freak out for revenge.

Mattie manages and propels the narrative, and for two hours True Grit never misses a beat. The story builds gently to its moving crescendo. The film takes its time, never folding back onto eye-rolling irony (again, how clever) or the cute, winking cuts that characterize their other films. The narrative of True Grit moves forward without any sense of the Coens’ Kubrickian disdain for the world of the film itself, which crystallizes in a perfection that some admire and others, like myself, can’t stand. Cogburn, too, doesn’t decay into the kind of personage into which you’d expect the Coens to transform him. On the sidelines, Matt Damon’s absurdly straight-laced Texas Ranger La Boeuf emerges out relatively unscathed by Joel and Ethan’s infinitely irritating irreverence, while Josh Brolin manages a deliciously rough and vile Western villain.

Here in the West, too, the Coen’s persistent and enjoyable interest in the bizarre—sometimes the downright ugly and appalling—finds a comfortable home in the mythology of our beloved frontier. From the strange doctor riding the Indian territories wearing a bearskin, to the sideshow-high forehead on a particularly short member of Lucky Ned Pepper’s outlaw gang, there’s always something to glance askew at. But in the weirdness of the Western, the Coens get tamed without losing their balls.

There’s more than a little of my bias here: I love Westerns, and I’m glad that the Coen Brothers saw fit to make a genuine Western as opposed to infuse their own irritating pseudo-stylistics into a Western formula, like they did in No Country for Old Men. What’s masterful about True Grit—and what, to me at least, is entirely new about it—is its tenderness. It comes out not only in Rooster’s tenderness for Mattie, or Mattie’s for him, but in the feel of the film itself: the smooth, round light that shines through the windows of the West; or how big and starry the sky looks, or, most movingly, when the Coens finally return to the beauty of rear-projection at the film’s climax. The melancholy of the film’s finale, too, which shows the West’s descent into an Americana traveling circus, is entirely new to the Coen Brothers. It all comes out like a love letter—something I never knew they could write.