The Spanish Prisoner

True Grit is the Coen Brothers’ remake of the Henry Hathaway film that starred John Wayne. I haven’t seen the earlier film, but I have read the Charles Portis novel that it is based on. Although I liked the novel’s narrative voice, I ultimately found it disappointing. I thought Portis could have done a lot more with the characters and the situation than he did. It ends up being a very conventional Western novel.

Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is a fourteen-year-old girl living in Arkansas during the 1870’s. When her father is shot to death by Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), she swears to get revenge. With some difficulty, she persuades Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a U.S. marshal with a sinister past, to pursue Chaney with her. They are joined by a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who is after Chaney for a separate murder. They follow Cheney into Choctaw Territory, where he has joined an outlaw band led by “Lucky” Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper).

The Coen Brothers have boasted that their film is faithful to Portis’s novel. In fact, they have taken enormous liberties with it. In the film, both Mattie and LaBoeuf speak a heavily stilted English. This is not how these characters talk in the book. I suppose the Coen Brothers thought this was funny; I just found it annoying. Also, we are expected to believe that contractions weren’t yet invented in the 1870’s. I lost count of how many times I heard someone begin a sentence with “Let us…”

Some of the changes are more troubling. In the novel, there is a Native American sheriff who helps Cogburn, LaBouef and Mattie at one point. This character has been completely written out of the movie. (The novel also has a Mexican character who is completely written out of the script.) In the film, Cogburn kicks two Native American boys who are tormenting a mule. If I remember correctly, in the novel the boys are white. Also, there is a scene in the novel of a public hanging. A Native American man is allowed to make a short speech before he is hanged. In the movie, he is dropped through the trap as he starts to speak. (There was some nervous laughter from the audience at this.) Considering that there are so few Westerns that present Native Americans in a positive light, one can only wonder why the Coens made these changes.

I found the movie moderately entertaining, in spite of the cutesy fake Shakespearean English and the problematic politics. Jeff Bridges is appropriately gruff as Cogburn, though at this point in his career he could probably play a gruff character in his sleep. Hailee Steinfeld and Matt Damon do the best they can with their awful lines. It could have been a much better film.

There seems to be a resurgence of interest in the Beats. This is the second time in a week that I’ve seen a film about a Beat writer.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is a documentary by Yony Leyser. It features interviews with many people who knew the writer. The film is well-made and provides many details, including film footage of the author himself, yet, when it was over, Burroughs was still something of a mystery to me. It’s still not clear to me what made the man tick. For example, the film discusses at length Burroughs’s obsession with firearms. We learn that he always carried a loaded gun and that he slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow. Yet the movie never succeeds in explaining this behavior. Did Burroughs have an experience that caused him to feel threatened? The film never indicates that he did.

Burrough’s fondness for weapons was bound up with a propensity for reckless behavior. He shot his wife, Joyce Vollmer, to death. (Not surprisingly, their son grew up to be a basketcase who drank himself to death at the age of thirty-three.) He nearly killed himself while doing target practice in his backyard. He shared needles with other addicts. He got himself bit while playing with a venomous snake. One of Burroughs’s friends expresses amazement that he lived as long as he did. The film discusses all these things dispassionately, though I think some moral judgement would have been appropriate here. Just because you’re a genius doesn’t give you the right to be an irresponsible asshole.

Critics have accused Burroughs of romanticizing drug use, but the film makes it clear that he hated being an addict. He quit several times, but he always eventually went back to his habit. As someone who has seen some of his friends develop addictions, I could relate to this part of the movie.

The film devotes a great deal of attention to Burroughs’s influence on the punk rock movement. There are interviews with several musicians, including Patti Smith. Since I’m not a huge fan of punk rock, I can’t say that I found this terribly impressive. I would have liked it if the movie had talked more about Burroughs’s influence on other writers, especially Beats such as Kerouac and Ginsberg.

The film does provide some human moments. We learn, for example, that Burroughs liked cats and that he shared recipes with his friends. Still, for the most part the film confirmed my previous impression of Burroughs as a cold and aloof person.

Howl, a film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, examines the circumstances surrounding the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem and the critical reaction to it. The film has been described by some as a cinematic form of literary criticism.

Much of the film is devoted to the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers), who published Howl. Equal attention is given to an interview that Ginsberg (James Franco) gave at the time of the trial. There is a re-enactment of the famous reading of the poem that Ginsberg gave in 1955 in San Francisco, and there are also scenes from Ginsberg’s early life. There are animated sequences that accompany the reading of the poem.

I found Franco convincing as Ginsberg. Overall, I thought the film was intelligently done, but, except for the some of the animation, I did not find it emotionally engaging. I think that this was due to the device of telling the story of Ginsberg’s life mostly through his interview. People who had a strong influence on Ginsberg (Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Carl Soloman) appear only in flashbacks, and we never hear them speak. (We never even hear Ferlinghetti speak during his trial). Ginsberg refers to his parents repeatedly (he feared his his father’s disapproval), but we don’t really learn much about them. Defenders of the film argue that it is meant as literary criticism, not as an attempt to fictionally portray Ginsberg’s life. Maybe so, but I prefer films that affect me on an emotional as well as an intellectual level.

One thing I can say for the film is that it did make me want to read more of Ginsberg’s writing.