True Grit (1969)
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Starring John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Robert Duvall
Awards: Won – Best Actor (Wayne). Nominated – Best Original Song
I had never given John Wayne much thought before. Even after delving into the legendary films of the past and trying to discover for myself the cinematic giants who created and starred in them, John Wayne never struck me as particularly interesting. There seemed to be something about the majority of his films, with their cardboard plots constructed only to showcase him blowing the shit out of Japs, Commies or whoever America’s enemies were at the time, that was childish, vulgar and antiquated. Wayne’s persona superseded his acting; he appeared to me to be a spokesman for thoughtless jingoism. And because I never did much investigation into his body of work, I assumed that he never played a part beyond a “rah-rah” American soldier, which wasn’t very appealing to me. Wayne, it appeared to me, was a relic of an era that I had missed and I was not keen to discover.
But through all that personal garbage, I didn’t realize that Wayne was more than a bygone icon. He could legitimately act. I watched the classic, John Ford-directed Stagecoach (1939), and thoroughly enjoyed both the film and Wayne’s performance. With the forthcoming True Grit remake coming this month, I thought it would be an appropriate time to watch the original film (for which Wayne won that year’s Best Actor Oscar) as preparation.
Wayne stars as Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed, cantankerous marshal of the old West intimately familiar with the mostly lawless nearby Indian territories. He is hired by a teenage girl named Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), who pays Cogburn to enter the Indian territory and hunt down and capture the man who killed her father. Famed country singer Glen Campbell accompanies the two on their mission as a Texas Ranger who is tracking the very same outlaw. Other famous and familiar faces appear throughout the film, such as Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall.
True Grit works because of the interaction between Wayne and Darby. Darby’s character is smart and resourceful, refusing to be pushed around by the male-dominated old West. Because of her attitude, she proves a worthy foil for Wayne, a hard-drinking old-timer who initially seems to care more about money (and himself) than justice. Their back and forth needling eventually gives way to a close friendship, one that is believable due to the quality acting involved. Wayne called one particular scene, in which he discusses his ex-wife with the girl, the best scene he ever did.
Wayne carries an appropriate balance of tenderness and menace in True Grit. We know because of what other characters say about him and how he conducts himself that he is a man to be feared. But Wayne plays the old gunfighter not so much grizzled as mellowed by his hard life, and his spitfire female companion finally gives him cause to come out of his shell.
Pieces of True Grit are a tad hokey. The film is rated G, so the standard western gunfights and killings are subdued and tame. The music and some dialogue lend themselves toward an aura of comedy, which works well for the film, though I wonder how the Coen Brothers will choose to play the material with their remake. True Grit is a fun, enjoyable film with great performances; a film that has caused me to rethink my stance on John Wayne and investigate some of his other films.
B+
The Truman Show (1998)
Directed by Peter Weir
Starring Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich
Awards: Nominated – Best Supporting Actor (Harris), Best Director, Best Original Screenplay
Jim Carrey’s career has followed an interesting trajectory. After a few years on the sketch comedy show In Living Color, he burst onto the national scene in the early 1990s and immediately became one of the biggest stars in the world. After several smash comedy hits, he branched out into “legitimate, dramatic acting” with films like The Truman Show and later Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). He carried these films to critical and commercial success despite their lack of fart noises or other scatological humor, proving that audiences would pay to watch him in more challenging and less juvenile roles. From there, unfortunately, he largely disappeared, coming out of hiding once a year or so to voice a computer-animated Ebenezer Scrooge or appear in some children’s schlock. Carrey is still a big name, but it seems he hasn’t appeared in anything anyone has cared about in close to a decade.
The Truman Show was Carrey’s first foray into a more dramatic film, though it is more appropriately termed a comedy with some dashes of humanity and drama. As you most likely know, Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, the star of a reality television series that follows him around 24 hours a day. Truman has no idea he is on television; the producers of the show have created a domed world that contains Truman and the other citizens (re: actors) of his town.
The Truman Show is fascinating in its exhibition and description of Truman’s artificial world and how everything works within it, and the best parts of the film are scenes where Truman is growing suspicious of exactly what is happening around him and starts testing his surroundings to try and figure things out. Indeed, much of The Truman Show can be considered a science-fiction caper, with Truman coming to realize his situation and seeing what wacky things he can get away with.
The film does miss some golden opportunities and does not delve into areas I would have liked to see explored. Truman has no existential crisis when he finds out everything and everyone he has ever known were manufactured. He doesn’t question how he came to adopt his constant cheery disposition and whether that’s who he really is or whether he’s been engineered to be that way. There are no meaningful confrontations with his wife, mother, or best friend, the three closest people to him. These conversations would have made the film a little more human and would have helped bring us down from the high-level concept and technical mumbo-jumbo we are bombarded with throughout. The Truman Show proved Carrey had the capacity for a true dramatic role and lends hope that he has another great act left within his career.
B
John Lacey
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