The Gospel Coalition

The Coen brothers are master storytellers. For the better part of 25 years, they have created their own brand of quirky, occasionally caricatured reality, a mishmash of Flannery O’Connor, Billy Wilder, Sam Peckinpah, and Chuck Jones. Their movies manage to be dark, funny, violent, fast-talking, and cartoonish, and though they’ve spanned their storylines across generations and genres, they maintain a common aesthetic and worldview.

Just before Christmas, they released their remake of True Grit, a classic Western film about a 14-year-old girl’s search for her father’s killer. She enlists the help of U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne in the original, Jeff Bridges now) and a Texas Ranger named La Bouef (Glen Campbell in the original, Matt Damon now). The remake follows the plot of the original, with the clear fingerprints of the Coens.

The story itself fits well inside the genre of revenge films—a staple of modern movie going. Denzel Washington’s Man on Fire, Mel Gibson’s Payback, Antonio Banderas’s Desperado, and Liam Neeson’s Taken are all stories about men taking justice into their own hands, pouring out wrath on everyone who has participated in the crime against them. Revenge themes emerge in several Quentin Tarantino films, first in Pulp Fiction, then in full force in Kill Bill 1 & 2, and taken to new and unexpected heights in Inglorious Basterds.

There’s something we love about revenge stories. Watching the local news is a painful experience—stories of corporate greed run side-by-side with stories of murder, rape, abuse, and neglect. We see the darkness of the world around us and cry out with the psalmist, “How long?” Revenge films speak to this cry in our heart, giving us a venue to indulge our hunger for justice, to see it carried out in a way we rarely see in real life. I think in some ways it’s a weird sort of eschatological hope. We want to know that eventually the bad guys lose. Good triumphs. Evil is crushed.

The Coens have told two revenge stories in recent years. No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is a revenge film told from the side of the transgressor. Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a gunfight, and walks away with a briefcase stuffed with $2 million. The ensuing story is a bloodbath as Anton Chigurh (the scariest Dora the Explorer lookalike of all time) goes on a merciless quest to reclaim the stolen money. The story is relentless, bleak, and nearly hopeless. The only glimmer of hope is in Ed Tom Wood (played by Tommy Lee Jones), who walks through the chaos with an earthy sadness, unsurprised by the brutality, but not cold, not jaded, not numb.

True Grit serves up revenge with a strong dose of American religious sentiment. As my friend Ed Marcelle put it, “It opens with a scripture and ends with a hymn and is a sermon in between.” He’s right. Beneath the surface of this story is a rich dialogue about justice and the problem of evil. The theme song, repeated throughout the film, is “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and the 14-year-old protagonist, Mattie Ross, is the portrait of steadfast faith in spite of the darkness of her circumstances. Stanley Fish unpacked this dimension of the film wonderfully in his review for The New York Times.

What interested me the most about their take on revenge is the contrast between Cogburn and La Boeuf. It’s no accident that Cogburn is played by Jeff Bridges, who will always be legendary for his role as The Dude in another Coen film, The Big Lebowski. Cogburn is a half-drunk, one-eyed sack of irresponsibility, notorious for killing criminals, found living in a hammock in the back of a Chinese grocery store. Just as he stands in stark contrast to the put-together, Hollywood-handsome La Boeuf, a self-aggrandizing Texas Ranger, The Dude stands in contrast to every other character he encounters in that film. The Dude is the absolute opposite of self-aggrandizing. He’s anything but self-assured. As described in Lebowski, he simply abides. In his own hapless way, he overcomes the challenges of his increasingly absurd circumstances.

For the Coens, heroism emerges from the fringe. When an evil board of executives is looking for “some jerk we can really push around,” they hire Norville Barnes (played by Tim Robbins), but the idiot from Muncie, Indiana, looking to find his way in the big city, ends up a brilliant creative mind, and foils their corrupt plans. When murderous evil is unleashed in Fargo, North Dakota, a slow-talking and sweet-natured pregnant woman (Frances MacDormand’s Marge Gunderson) ends up unraveling the mystery and catching the criminals. It’s the everyman, the commoner who ends up being transcendent. The worn and one-eyed Marshall who seems to belong in the bottom of the whiskey barrel ends up demonstrating the meaning of the phrase “true grit.” Or it’s the 14-year-old girl who takes command of her own destiny, demanding and insisting on justice when every authority in the world seems to be denying it to her. La Boeuf, the Texas Ranger in shiny spurs with a bright smile, continually disappoints. Like most of the wealthy, powerful, and credentialed figures in Coen films, he’s one-upped by someone well beneath his station. These castoffs always seem to find themselves on top when the dust settles. It’s a divine reversal; the foolish things shaming the wise. The King of kings being born in a barn, raised in backwaters, and executed.

Even as Mattie Ross faces down her nemesis and defeats him in True Grit, she’s knocked backward into a pit by her weapon's recoil. Revenge brings a cold comfort, resulting in an immediate descent into a snake-filled darkness. Her righteousness doesn’t result in a neat and tidy ending; it leaves her scarred, poisoned, and broken. Revenge, even petty revenge, never ends in as happy a way as we’d like, with a neat and tidy moment of “I told you so” justice. Instead, Like Mattie, we end our journey scarred both by victimization and retribution.

Perhaps that’s because what we need is retribution so vast that it calls for wrath that would overwhelm us. If our hunger for revenge were fulfilled, the result would be a flood that would drown even us, and our petty attempts at substitutes will ultimately be dissatisfying. The “justice” we hunger for would bring about our destruction. Thanks be to God—there’s a better retribution and a better rescue from the pit; one that emerges from the fringes, carries out justice, and saves us from the wrath we deserve.

Mike Cosper is pastor of worship and arts at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He writes on the gospel and the arts for The Gospel Coalition.