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.

Crazy Heart, dir. Scott Cooper (2009)

There’s nothing surprising or radical in Crazy Heart. Instead, the film serves as a brilliant reminder: it reminds us of Jeff Bridges’ greatness and urges us to recall how irritating and overindulgent a performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal can be. The film also reminds us about a particular kind of movie made in the United States during the 1970s—films with strong main characters and stronger performances. Crazy Heart exists very much in the tradition of those films.  Bridges quiet, genuinely soulful portrayal of how country singer Bad Blake gets his groove back carries the film into serious character study territory and keeps it from veering into overly sentimental, saccharine territory while also deftly covering up the film’s heavy reliance on music.

As Bad Blake, Bridges is a pleasure to watch: his hands flutter absentmindedly, his face, scarred by years of bowling alleys and dive bars, scowls at even the most inviting fans. Faced with such an overwhelming presence on screen, I can imagine Scott Cooper had no choice but to capture it: the often hand-held camera makes sure that Blake is always its focal point, seemingly freeing up space for Bridges’ Blake to be on screen, and for us to watch him. David Thompson once wrote that one of the great pleasures in cinema was just watching Humphrey Bogart walk across the frame: watching Bridges suggests much the same thing.

Aside from Bridges, the film is populated by colorful wide shots of the southwestern United States and a brief, pitch-perfect Colin Farrell as Tommy Sweet, Blake’s former protégé turned country music sensation. When Sweet sings the tunes Blake has written, he doesn’t so much croon as smile them, all pretty boy charm without any of the pain or skill Bad Blake possesses in spades. That, of course, is the point: Cooper demonstrates his dedication to an authentic depiction of the country music circuit, even not-so-good country music.  In this, Bridges, who refused to do the film unless T Bone Burnett was aboard to write the music, probably egged him on.

Yet the film’s attitude towards authentic music is problematic. Much of the film’s music is perfect in its familiarity, and the songs are frequently beautiful. Yet I’m reminded of Robert Altman’s Nashville, for which the director ordered the actors to write and perform their own songs, regardless of quality, allowing for an organic musical landscape to form within in the film. It’s a way in which Altman managed to make the music in a film about country music secondary to the film: he wouldn’t let high-profile songs dwarf his work.  Crazy Heart, on the other hand, strives for good songs–and it gets them, at the cost, perhaps, of a perfect film. The songs, maybe, are too good; the soundtrack, maybe, plays too much like one of your favorite mixtapes. Fallin’ & Flyin’, The Weary Kind, Hold on You–I love these songs already. Yet they reveal that the film rests its laurels on the quality of its music, instead of working to make the film itself unveil the persons behind the songs. Bridges’ performance, of course, hides this–but it’s a flaw nonetheless, lurking behind every frame. No matter how good the film is, no matter how sublime Jeff Bridges’ performance, I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like had Cooper considered the film before the music.

The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel Cohen (1998)

Bowling involves a straight shot down a smooth wooden lane. It’s a mechanized ritual; mediated by the apparatus that replaces the pins (perfectly), the chute that returns your ball. Nothing confused about it. The Dude (Jeff Bridges), Lebowski, a California tumbleweed leftover from an era when your opinion, man, was respected; Walter (John Goodman), Vietnam vet who, though the haze of his profanities, is obviously haunted by the ineffectiveness of his sacrifice; and the peripheral Donnie (Steve Buscemi), transparently born to die as a narrative cop-out—but who wasn’t? Together they form a bowling triumvirate: straight shots, the three of them, focused on rolling a heavy ball down a lacquered runway from which they never take off.

The Dude has a picture of Richard Nixon bowling over his home bar: it’s a suggestion, an intelligent, provocative suggestion, to be sure, but only that. Everything that comes together to form The Big Lebowski is powerful because it avoids direct, positive, hollow political statements, preferring to embed them as themes in the film’s masterfully confused narrative, using the Dude as a prism through which the landscape of the early ‘90s is visible with all its complicated political and historical baggage.

The Dude, we know, has his rug pissed on and wants due compensation. The rug-pissers got the wrong Lebowski: they were after the big Lebowski—wealthy, self-made, wheelchair-bound, the big Lebowski is a Dick Cheney lookalike who spurts Republican catchphrases against “free handouts”  and announces, at every turn, that the Dude’s revolution has failed. He helps kids in Watts—that “bitter pocket of reality,” according to Thomas Pynchon—go to college.  Watts, the place where the big Lebowski’s vision of L.A. can’t support itself—and now he’s taking hold of even that.

In a crystalline narrative turn, the big Lebowski hires the Dude to find his kidnapped wife—shades of General Sternberg in The Big Sleep–and the plot becomes dense and unintelligible, featuring luminaries of the L.A. art scene, nihilist pornographers including Ben Gazzara, false handoffs, and child conception. Just as Bogie was a holdover of depression-era decency in an America rich with wartime industry and dizzy with atomic bombs, the Dude’s chunky plastic sunglasses signal the relativism of an optimistic ‘60s lefty eclipsed by Reaganite yuppiedom and Gulf War righteousness.  As a detective, the Dude is suitably carefree, relying on hunches and suspicions. Epiphanies are few and far-between, but the Dude seems to make sense of it all in a fragmentary, half-baked in a way not so unlike Bogie, either. The Dude stitches it all together himself, and he has to. The Big Lebowski is proficient in denying any redemptive revelation. The mystery, in a sense, is never solved: there’s no way to make sense of it all. Pynchon comes to mind, again: always the 49^th day, the Vineland dream overrun by highway patrolmen. Lines aren’t drawn in the sand, there’s no shallow paean to Altamont: just perpetual circles of confusion, the unwavering power of history—even in L.A.—and through it all, the Dude abiding always.