grit

The True Grit class went well, and the movie was . . . interesting. The print was so old the Technicolor had faded to sepia, and in copying it to DVD, the media center left off the last few minutes! Fortunately, one of the students had seen the film, and could tell us how the ending differed from the book.

The movie followed the book with almost xerographic accuracy. More than 90% of the dialogue was straight from the book; the plots were almost identical. Here's a funny thing that Antony Donovan pointed out: the same thing happened last year when I screened the TV special version of The Great Gatsby – but Gatsby was ruined by the faithfulness, and True Grit was not. At a first approximation, I think you can say that's a difference between straightforward clear writing and complex artistic prose. Layers of meaning are lost when an actor is interposed between the novel and the "consumer."

But Gatsby is a silly plot elevated to art by the quality of the prose. True Grit is a damned interesting story told in a plain way.

One thing that was lost in translation: in both the book and the movie, plucky little Matty faces down adults time and again, and always gets the best of them, by dint of cleverness and wisdom beyond her years. There's a delicious ironic tinge to this in the book – it is, after all, an old lady telling an old familiar story for the thousandth time, so of course she's the hero, and of course she's never wrong. In the movie that quality of irony is lost in service to assumed verisimilitude. Little Matty is just as plucky as all get-out. So it loses a level of adult humor.

John Wayne is still da man, though. Fill your hands, you sons of bitches!

Joe