“Why Do You Think I am Paying You if Not to Have My Way?” Genre Complications in the Free‐Market Critiques of Fictional and Filmed Versions of True Grit
2015; Wiley; Volume: 48; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jpcu.12262
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
ResumoExplicating the American frontier inevitably evokes the Rashomon-like complexity of perceptions that has made the Western genre an apt and flexible vehicle for exploring questions of economic and political justice. Over the past century in fiction and film, the Western has offered up a rotating, shape-shifting palette of stakeholders and viewpoints (ranchers may be glorified or vilified, townspeople may be painted as corrupt or virtuous, Native Americans as savage aggressors or innocent victims, and so on). This commodiousness has stretched genre boundaries, and, while genre insurrections have been mounted and subsumed, new narrative tendencies such as postmodernism have arisen to create territories within territories. The resulting heterogeneity has created a bountiful generic landscape in which one simple story of a young girl's hiring of a federal marshal to track her father's killer, a brief tale of free-market justice, may be constructed with widely divergent results as evidenced by the three versions of True Grit—Charles Portis’ 1967 novel, Henry Hathaway's 1968 film adaptation, and Joel and Ethan Coen's 2010 cinematic adaptation. Portis' novel is a wry cautionary tale told in flashback by the protagonist, Mattie Ross, a now elderly and embittered spinster who has given her right arm, literally, as well as her soul to achieve justice for her murdered father and economic security for her family; Rooster Cogburn, the marshal with “true grit,” has died alone and in obscurity, ground down by the need to make a living. Hathaway's adaption, on the other hand, offers a present-tense narrative of free-market triumph that ends with young Mattie coming of age unscathed and hopeful and the aging Cogburn rejuvenated with a new sense of personal and vocational purpose. As for the Coens, they spin a comic yarn of gothic absurdity in which personality is destiny and economics are immaterial; “true grit” is merely true eccentricity dictating Mattie's fate as a wealthy humorless spinster and Cogburn's ignominious end as a carnival sideshow. One story, three different socio-economic outlooks. While that disparity may be viewed simply as the result of opposing political perspectives, the adaptations' alternate directions may also be understood as resultant to generic variations achieved through adaptive techniques. For, each version of True Grit is a distinct iteration of the Western genre; all three may be the same animal, so to speak, yet they each represent a different breed. Like the two films it inspired, the novel is set in post-Civil War Arkansas and what was then the Choctaw Nation (now Oklahoma) and tells the story of 14-year-old Mattie Ross and her quest to bring her father's murderer to justice with the aid of the one-eyed federal marshal Rooster Cogburn and a young Texas Ranger named LeBoeuf. The ambition when doing a period movie is not to sand the edges off the past,' says Joel. ‘In our minds, we never got close to thinking about it in terms of the western. We weren't thinking: let's shoot it in widescreen like Sergio Leone. ‘Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing,’ Ethan interrupts, ‘and it's definitely not opera. And it's definitely not that John Ford tragic thing. Our sensibility has nothing to do with that.’ ‘If anything,’ Joel continues, ‘we were thinking about it more in terms of Alice in Wonderland. She goes across the river into a place where she sees all these weird things, weird landscapes …and then it becomes weirder and weirder, pushing it more toward a fairytale thing, or Night of the Hunter, in the sense of the landscape becoming more self-consciously poetic. That's about as far from Ford as you can get.’ (Shone) Drawing the Western's parameters as narrowly as a Ford/Leone dichotomy may be something of a pose for the Coens, given their previous appropriation of the genre's tropes and signposts in films such as The Big Lebowski (1998) and No Country for Old Men (2007). Don't fence us in, the filmmakers seem to protest, while surely recognizing the Western covers a vast territory, stretching back to Civil War era pulp novels. Since Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 foundational frontier essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the mythos of the western frontier has infused the nation's political and cultural outlook so deeply it is almost impossible to imagine twentieth century America without it. Certainly it is hard to imagine Hollywood without it. The industry's first “prestige” picture was Edwin S. Porter's Great Train Robbery in 1903, five years before the real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are said to have died in a Bolivian shootout (Varner xiii). More than 4000 Westerns were produced between 1926 and 1967 alone, constituting a quarter of all Hollywood film production (Indick 1). During the second half of the twentieth century, the Western served as the nation's “cultural wallpaper,” even as it provided a diverse means of aesthetic, cultural, and political expression (O'Brien 38). Still, the Western's very vastness over time and terrain has given rise to a sprawling and overlapping taxonomy, making it impossible to corral every single Western into a neat category. The oldest and most predominate type of Western, at least in sheer volume (and the one perhaps most firmly branded in public consciousness) is the classical Western, wherein the cowboy hero saves and purifies a community by means of “regenerative violence” (Varner 48). In the sixties, the antimyth Western challenged the idea of the classical hero and debated the virtue of the violence, and in turn birthed a range of variants including the revisionist or counterculture Western, neorealist, and formalist Westerns; in the meantime the psychological and gunfighter Westerns, begat from the fifties renaissance Western, concerned themselves with social justice and balancing the rights of the haves and have-nots (Slotkin 279); the elegiac Western mourned the death of the old West; the spaghetti Western “deterritorialized” the genre's geography and moral center, serving as a key influence in the formalist Western (Varner 95); other generic subtypes include: the feminist Western, the African-American Western, even the post-Western (Varner 11), and the postmodern Western (Varner 168). Richard Slotkin and Michael Coyne establish broader categorizations, Slotkin dividing the Western generally into two political camps, the “progressive,” favoring consolidation of power into more efficient corporate and government economies, and the “populist,” upholding Jeffersonian agrarian and economic individualism (22). While identifying four categories—mythic, auteurist, structuralist, and political-allegorical—Coyne creates an overarching dichotomy of sociopolitical versus psychological, with his “community Westerns,” largely synonymous with classical Westerns, and his “odyssey Westerns” which “equate the rugged landscapes with the individual's tortured soul” (7). Because the Western is set on the frontier where government structures are primitive and territorial boundaries often unsettled, stories in the genre are usually animated by a central conflict concerning the allocation of physical or legal resources—in other words, the land or the law. However, those immediate concerns may or may not be what any particular Western is “about.” Coyne, for example, suggests that “the community Western often reflects the tension between citizen and society, while the odyssey Western customarily includes this conflict only to transcend it—and centres [sic] thereafter on interplay between psyche and landscape” (7). Of course, the genre is also used, as any historical genre is often employed, to examine current problems through the lens of past dilemmas. Stanley Corkin is far from alone in identifying the cowboy of the fifties as America's symbolic cold warrior in films that reveal the construct “of national identity in a period marked by intense chauvinism and broad acceptance of a kind of economic and cultural hegemony” (71). Examining Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) and John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), Corkin sees the cowboy as bringing order and economic vitality to untamed civilizations, a function many believed America should perform in the Cold War world, and that, “in the highly influential terms of these films, the genius defined by the frontier experience and of American exceptionalism is the way in which the ‘West’ ultimately produces a world made safe for corporate capitalism in an international context” (88). Yet Ford, the supposedly staunch Cold War defender, also revised Alan LeMay's story in his 1956 adaptation of The Searchers, so that Slotkin can view that film as directly challenging the “‘savage war’/Cold War analogy” and its “overwhelming, and finally malign, pressure to choose ‘destruction’ over ‘rescue’” (Slotkin 474). Moreover, any broad acceptance of American hegemony gave way during the 1960s, as the hegemony of the classical Western was in turn broken by revisionist categories and dissenting opinions in films ranging from Arthur Pen's Little Big Man (1970) to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), and from George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) to Ralph Nelson's Soldier Blue (1970). Tellingly, Sergio Leone overruled Henry Fonda's desire to hide his blue eyes behind brown contact lens to play the villain of the 1968 classic Once Upon a Time in the West (Teichmann 302). While the Western steadily fell from popularity throughout the seventies, suffering a near death blow from Michael Cimino's 1980 disaster, Heaven's Gate, some critics see the Western's influence as indomitable—or, perhaps, insidious. According to Anderson the myth of the frontier and “its apology for and promotion of cowboy imperialism, Manifest Destiny, and all that this cultural doctrine implies” lives on so strongly his definition of the “Frontier Western” encompasses everything from Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) to Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) and even to the Coens' Lebowski (6). Acknowledging that films such as Raiders provide “a powerful recrudescence of the old myths of regeneration through violence,” Slotkin dismisses them as mere “genre-nostalgia” (640), yet writing in 1995 he also viewed “Reaganomics” as the third formulation of Turner's frontier hypothesis in its assertion that low taxes and deregulation would serve “in just the way that the opening of ‘vast untapped reserves’ of free land or gold or cheap oil on the Frontier had energized the economy of the past” (646). As for the diverging political and economic views offered up by the three versions of True Grit, they may be understood as a consequence of genre variation: Portis' novel is both an elegy and revisionist Western, mourning the loss of heroic individualism while demythologizing any romantic ideals of frontier community. Hathaway's film is a classical Western (or in Coyne's classification a community Western) glorifying society and the hero who saves it, while the Coens' adaptation is both a postmodern and an odyssey Western, emphasizing isolation and psychological aberrance over any overtly political vision. As to how the two adaptations could arrive at what are essentially opposing destinations and philosophies—opposite to each other as well as to their source material—a partial answer is most obviously apparent in adaptive techniques. The film-maker bent on ‘faithful’ adaptation must, as a basis for such an enterprise, seek to preserve the major cardinal functions. […] However, even if the latter are preserved in the filming process, they can be ‘deformed’ by varying the catalysers which surround them. (14) To understand the adaptations' alteration of cardinal functions and distortion of catalyzers, it is necessary to begin with a brief review of the novel itself. Appearing at a time when American assumptions about national power and domestic norms were under question as never before, the novel True Grit was an unqualified success, both rebutting and affirming those assumptions simultaneously by juxtaposing high heroics against a backdrop of drab, even squalid, economics. Although as previously noted, while the Western is generally concerned with the allocation of resources, those allocations are often framed in lofty terms of peace and justice. True Grit's economic concerns feel more Dickens than dime novel—a revisionist take on the frontier that is also elegiac, couched as a memoir related by Mattie in old age from her home in Yell County, Arkansas, purporting to be the “true account” of her long-ago adventure in the Choctaw Nation when she set out to bring her father's murderer to justice. The crime precipitating Mattie's quest is simple and brutal: “[A] coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces …” (Portis 9) The novel's quest plot is also straightforward: Mattie leaves behind two younger siblings and a mother “who can't spell cat” to go to Fort Smith to claim her father's body and settle his affairs (Portis 13). Once there, she drives a good bargain with the auctioneer who sold Tom Ross a string of ponies before his death, but she also discovers Chaney has escaped westward into the Choctaw Nation and has joined the Ned Pepper outlaw gang. Determined to see justice done, she uses the promise of her settlement money to contract with the federal marshal Rooster Cogburn, a “man with true grit,” to ride into the Nation to apprehend Chaney (Portis 55). However, before they can set off, the Texas Ranger LeBoeuf arrives in pursuit of Chaney for the murder of a Texas senator. When Mattie rebuffs his request to join the search—she wants Chaney to face a judge in Arkansas not in Texas—LeBoeuf goes directly to Cogburn, and Mattie finds the two men negotiating over the substantial Texas bounty. Cogburn tells Mattie it does not matter where Chaney hangs, but Mattie is adamant. “Why do you think I am paying you if not to have my way?” she says (Portis 93). Unfortunately for Mattie, LeBoeuf's “way” is more lucrative. Yet the young girl will not be deterred even when she is left behind. Armed against the winter cold with her father's hat and coat and carrying his old dragoon pistol, she catches up with Cogburn and LeBoeuf as they cross the river into the Choctaw Nation, earning her place in the posse with her fearless horsemanship. Deeper into the Nation, they ambush Pepper's accomplices, and later Mattie is kidnapped by the Pepper gang and taken to a high rock ledge where she is left alone with the homicidal Chaney. As LeBoeuf arrives to rescue her, in the field below Cogburn confronts Ned Pepper and his three fellow outlaws. In the ensuing gunfight, the marshal kills three of the gang and, from the ledge, LeBoeuf shoots Pepper in time to save Cogburn who has been pinned under his fallen horse. At that, Chaney jumps from behind to bash LeBoeuf's head; Mattie shoots Chaney, but the recoil from her father's revolver throws her backward into a snake pit, where she breaks her arm and is snake-bitten. Cogburn reaches the ledge and kills Chaney, and, after he and LeBoeuf manage to pull Mattie out, he makes a dramatic race with Mattie to the doctor to save her life. In the novel True Grit, every turn of the story is driven or marked by the act of negotiation against a backdrop of harsh economic conditions, beginning with Mattie's need to “outsource” justice by hiring a federal marshal (her ability to do so made possible only by her earlier savvy negotiations with the auctioneer), and with the sizable bounty that has put LeBoeuf on Chaney's trail. Negotiations that do not involve cold, hard cash often prove unsuccessful: Cogburn bargaining for information with an injured Pepper accomplice, promising medical aid and leniency; his later offer to Pepper to exchange Mattie and Chaney for stalling the posse; and Mattie's futile offer of her silence to Chaney in return for her life. Although negotiations remain key in the two adaptations, their meaning and consequences vary widely. In the Coens' film, their signification is subverted and “deformed” through changed catalyzers, while in Hathway's film, alterations in cardinal functions, combined with the intertexuality of an iconic Hollywood star, radically alter the negotiations' aftermath. Couched as a memoir, the novel's narration is set in the twentieth century, with a matter-of-fact yet mournful epilogue revealing the characters' fates in the intervening years. Rooster Cogburn has long since passed away, and, even by the time of his death in 1903, the lawman's Wild West had dwindled down to a carnival attraction traveling the Southeast with cut-rate displays of faux derring-do by Cogburn, Frank James, and Cole Younger. Mattie recalls traveling to Memphis for what she hopes will be her first reunion with Cogburn since her rescue, after trying and failing over the years to contact the peripatetic lawman, even as he tried and failed at various jobs and living arrangements. However, in Memphis, Mattie found only James and Younger, notorious outlaws wielding fans and Coca-Colas as they inform Mattie of Cogburn's death by an undignified “disorder that he called ‘night hoss’” (Portis 213). Having lost her arm to that long-ago snakebite, Mattie seems to be “snake bitten” in another way as well: she has grown up, and into, a solitary and starchy spinster with plenty of money but no close relationships, and no one who can even appreciate the importance of her long-ago experience. From both her own family and the community at large she senses only ridicule, all too aware of Yell County's perception of her as a “cranky old maid” who has simply pulled a “stunt” by having Cogburn's casket moved from the Confederate cemetery in Memphis and reburied in her own family's graveyard (Portis 214). Thus are the corrosive effects of the endless free-market bargaining rendered. Mattie begins True Grit negotiating to feed her hapless mother and fatherless siblings and to bring her father's killer to justice; she ends as a wealthy banker driven to haggle seemingly out of bitter habit, too stingy to travel to Memphis on her own rail pass or to pay the “premium rate” the railroad asks for shipping Cogburn's body, instead “work(ing) a deal” to have the casket hidden inside a grocery shipment. The young girl of large spirit and “true grit” has grown so small in her thinking she cannot help toting up the cost of Cogburn's tombstone: $65 (Portis 214). With his dark ending and relentless emphasis on economics, Portis presents the frontier as a place where heroics are fine and good, but money-grubbing is just as necessary and, in its way, just as dangerous. Ultimately, Mattie has kept neither body nor soul completely in one piece. In Hathaway's film, this bleak dénouement is replaced entirely by an upbeat ending that unites Mattie, Cogburn, and LeBoeuf into an ad hoc family. Cogburn accompanies Mattie, her recovering arm in a sling but intact, to her Yell County home where she asks him to “rest beside” her in the family graveyard when they die. In all three renditions of True Grit, Cogburn is shown to be a solitary man. However, in Hathaway's version, Cogburn's loneliness is played for greater pathos through musical cues and Cogburn's plaintive statement that even his cat does not belong to him. Thus, the moment is both poignant and positive when he accepts Mattie's offer. Their kinship is further formalized when Mattie gives Cogburn her father's gun, and the happy ending is complete when Cogburn gallops away, leaping over a four-rail fence to ride off into the distance as the orchestral score swells and Mattie watches the horizon with a hopeful expression. Thus, with these alterations to cardinal functions excising all the elegiac and revisionist elements of the story, Hathaway's film is a straightforward adventure Western in the classical and community mold, offering up an Old West that is robust and very much alive, a place where community triumphs over injustice. As written and as portrayed by a twenty-one-year-old Kim Darby, Hathaway's Mattie is older, softer, and more suitable for romance than the novel's somber fourteen-year-old. In this version LeBoeuf, played by Glen Campbell, is killed by Chaney's blow, another change in cardinal function, which has the effect of elevating LeBoeuf's stature as a fallen hero; when Mattie realizes he's dead, her longing gaze implies an unspoken romantic possibility, further emphasized in her conversation at the family gravesite. Hathaway also elevates the landscape physically and metaphorically, shooting the film in the high mountains of Colorado rather than the novel's scrublands of eastern Oklahoma and interspersing long shots of the trio riding against the backdrop of majestic mountains accompanied by a score reminiscent of the “Marlboro Man” cigarette theme typical of classical Westerns of the sixties era. Not unlike the Marlboro Man with his benign cigarette habit, Hathaway's True Grit offers up a rosy view of a free-market frontier where people and relationships flourish thanks to all their economic transactions. By the end of the film, financial transactions have led to emotional transformations that have elevated, even ennobled, the characters, securing LeBeouf's legacy as a hero, as well as Mattie's and Cogburn's happy futures. As a now sober and fully abled Rooster Cogburn rides into the sunset, surely to more adventures, he leaves a hopeful (and fully abled) Mattie Ross standing on a high hill and on the threshold of a promising life. The director and the screenwriter who cooked up this happy ending were both old Hollywood hands, nearing their own rides into the sunset after long and prolific careers closely associated with Westerns. Hathaway's first venture as a director came in 1932 with the Western Heritage of the Desert, and, in the six years prior to making True Grit, he directed or codirected four westerns, including The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) starring John Wayne and How the West Was Won (1962), one of MGM's last commercially successful epic westerns. Screenwriter Marguerite Roberts had a more complex history in Hollywood. In the thirties and forties, she was highly regarded and highly paid, but in 1951 she refused to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted until 1962. It is ironic that Wayne, avatar of both the Western and right-wing politics, should earn his only Oscar from a script by a blacklisted writer, but the more important question is whether one should view True Grit's defense of frontier capitalism as the apology or apostasy of a leftist. To this end, the evidence of Roberts' filmography seems to reveal a writer in service not to Stalin but to movie stars: Gable, Hepburn, Tracy, Lana Turner, Robert Mitchum. Her few attempts to add complexity to preblacklist Westerns—to portray a credible white/Native American love story in a captivity narrative and to suggest money as a motive of a powerful landowner in another film (Buhle and McGilligan 577–78)—seem slanted more for interest than ideology. Also, even during the blacklist, Roberts felt supported by the studios, by bosses who gave her a “marvelous settlement,” and treated her in a way that led her to believe that they “kind of liked it” that she would not “fink” (Buhle and McGilligan 580). Back in the saddle after the blacklist, she wrote Hathaway's 1968 Five Card Stud, and she would go on to write Hathaway's last western, The Shootout (1971). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Roberts' allegiance to the classical Western was personal, as the daughter and granddaughter of Colorado sheriffs. “I was weaned on stories about gunfighters and their doings, and I know all the lingo too,” she said (“Marguerite Roberts”). As they neared their last ride together, these two amigos—Roberts at 64, Hathaway at 71—were ready not just to make a last stand for the classical Western, but to gallop into the headwinds of the sixties with the force of Cogburn's double-barreled assault on Ned Pepper. Indeed, when John Wayne, a veteran of more than 60 westerns, made his now famous charge, theater audiences may have felt he carried on his saddle the weight of history, politics, and even the Western genre itself. Wayne also had his own personal considerations in the wake of his 1964 diagnosis of cancer. News of his illness had rippled across the public consciousness so strongly that Joan Didion was compelled to voice her anxiety that cancer might be the “one shootout that Wayne could lose” (32). Visiting the Katie Elder set, Didion found a frail Wayne, suffering from a cold, in need of an oxygen inhalator on standby. Physical fragility was especially dire for Wayne, as Deborah Thomas notes: “Although the perceived unity of all stars depends on their physical qualities in this way, John Wayne has been constructed more than most (or at least more than most white males) as a star whose meaning is profoundly corporeal” (75). Wayne seems physically diminished in Katie Elder, and while he triumphs over the hired gunman in 1968s El Dorado, to critics like McVeigh, the film felt shopworn and out of step with the times (167). True Grit opened the week after Sam Peckinpah and his Wild Bunch rode into theatres kicking up a storm force of revisionism, and, initially, True Grit appears to offer its own critical view of the genre, as John Wayne takes on a character far more fallible than the heroic ideal audiences had become accustomed to seeing. Wayne had played hard men with less than sterling traits before—the tyrannical trail boss Dunston in Red River and Ethan, the racially obsessed tracker in The Searchers—but the Duke had never before played a character so prone to foibles, an authority figure so short on authority. In the beginning of Red River, Dunston seizes land from its Mexican owner, but immediately that theft is transformed into a patriotic enterprise, a thriving cattle ranch that feeds a growing country; some of Ethan's racial hatred stems from the Comanches' murder of the woman he loved. Moreover, Ethan is shown to be a ruggedly competent “man of the west.” Rooster Cogburn, on the other hand, is not only a drunk who falls off his horse, he is also a former but unrepentant bank robber who stole simply because he needed the money. Yet this fallibility becomes an asset in the film's climax, the intertextuality adding drama and credibility to the character's reversal to “John Wayne” type, riding hard and straight into the gunfight, then riding—and running—just as hard to save Mattie's life, propelled not only by the character's love for Mattie but also by the iconic implacability of those earlier incarnations, of Dunston driving men and cattle with maniacal force, of Ethan in relentless pursuit, knowing he'll succeed “as sure as the earth's turning.” Would the genre survive in these new turbulent times? The True Grit of this posse answers hell yes. In fact, throughout the next decade, the onslaught of revisionism ensured the Western's vitality, as Hollywood continued to examine the Old West, now through a newer, more critical lens. It was not until 1980 when Cimino delivered his studio-destroying bomb, Heaven's Gate, that the Western lost its appeal to producers. By then the country had its own “cowboy” president in Ronald Reagan, and Hollywood was starting to focus on generating “junk food for fourteen-year-olds” (Menand 6) and that market's infatuation with large, effects-driven, tent-pole movies (Menand 4). Still, the Western survived in intermittent fashion, albeit as Slotnick notes, “as a special form of expression […] rather than a routine resort for the tellers of popular tales” (633). Now, cue the Coens, postmodern tricksters who galloped into “Indiewood” four years after the Heaven's Gate debacle with the neo-noir crime thriller Blood Simple, a title inspired by the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest (King 239). Literary allusions have threaded through much of the Coens' work: the surreal Barton Fink (1991), which alluded to real-life writers William Faulkner and Clifford Odets; Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), “inspired” by The Big Sleep (1946) and The Odyssey, respectively. As for the anxiety of influence, like most of their postmodern peers, the Coens do not suffer from it so much as celebrate it (particularly that of director Preston Sturges). Their acute consciousness of genre is ongoing, whether exhibited in appropriations of generic conventions, or rejection of them, or simply crazy salad inversions of them, as in the “loosely based” translation of a noir classic into comedy. Comedy, usually dark, is perhaps the most prominent hallmark of the Coen oeuvre, the ridiculous providing the leitmotif. Fargo's (1996) Marge Gunderson, for example, might embody a distaff Chandler detective/knight errant, heading down those mean streets without herself being mean; in the film's final frames as Marge and her husband snuggle in bed, it is also possible to envision Auden's vicarage with its state of grace restored. Yet there is also that utter placidness in Margie's digestion, both of her food and of the carnage around her. Beatific or perhaps a bit bovine? What about those means streets of Brainerd, Minnesota (another Coen joke) peopled with what Janet Maslin calls “piquant weirdo details”? As Denby points out, the Coens' “outré regionalism borders on contempt,” and Lane suggests, “You feel that the Coens are holding up specimens of their own invention, as if with a pair of tweezers, and saying proudly, ‘Look! Amusing people! Freaky situations!’” The one film in which the Coens “play it straight” is No Country for Old Men, melding thriller elements with western motifs. Gilmore points to the fil
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