It's good. Sometimes it's damn good.
But it's not a game-changer.
Joel and Ethan Coen's "True Grit" was unveiled very quietly last week and more openly this week, and the embargo on reviews and reactions was lifted on Wednesday morning.
Which means that I can now say that the Coens' version of the Charles Portis novel is better than the 1969 John Wayne movie made from the same book.
It's dark and moody, with a wonderful performance by Jeff Bridges as indomitable but frequently-soused Marshall Rooster Cogburn -- the role that won Wayne an Oscar -- and a terrific turn by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld as a headstrong teenage girl out to avenge her father's death.
It's also funny, and not always in that dark, twisted Coen-black-humor kind of way. Long stretches of it are so slapsticky that I could see Paramount submitting it to the Golden Globes in the Comedy or Musical category.
Some actors, particularly Josh Brolin as the villainous (but apparently moronic) Tom Chaney, are so cartoonish that they seem to have dropped in from an entirely different Coen Brothers movie, from "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" or "Burn After Reading."
As we've seen in "No Country for Old Men," bad men in stark landscapes can bring out the best in the Coens – and the material provides a rich canvas of vengeance and righteousness, moral rectitude facing off against dissolute excess, all of it captured by the remarkable eye of Roger Deakins.
But there's also a tonal battle going on here, as the film's brilliantly persuasive doomy finality dissolves abruptly into a goofiness that undercuts the resonance the movie might otherwise have.
It's a light film that occasionally feels heavy -- and while that is no doubt exactly what the Coens intended, it may well keep "True Grit" from being taken seriously enough by Oscar voters to become the strong Best Picture contender that some had predicted.
I'm saying this without seeing any other reviews, without knowing what the box-office numbers will be, and without having the experience of viewing the movie with an audience larger than 10. In this vacuum of sorts, though, "True Grit" strikes me as a solid, expert piece of entertainment with a dark Coen underbelly, but not the kind of knockout that'll be the last film standing.
And that shouldn't be surprising, given the source material. One thing I don’t get is the number of outraged recent tweets and blog posts that treat the original "True Grit" as sacred ground, and take the Coens to task for daring to despoil a Western masterpiece with their new-fangled sensibility.
Look, the original novel was a wonderfully-crafted page-turner with a few indelible characters, worthy of a screen adaptation but hardly deserving of canonization.
And the first movie was a popcorn flick, nothing more. It was fun, and a bit campy, and entertaining enough, though it definitely hasn't aged well.
