Hailee Steinfeld is quite engaging, and Matt Damon develops an intriguing complexity that makes one wish he had more screen-time. Does the Coens' version measure up as film worth seeing on its own accord? Yes we are presented here with a beautiful, frightening, amusing piece of 'Americana.' There are scenes approaching dream-like states, as in the meeting with the bear-man, and during Rooster's desperate drive to get Mattie to a doctor. If most remember the Hathaway film as a 'John Wayne film,' that is due simply to Wayne's bravura performance. When we add up screen time and lines of dialog, we discover that Mattie not only has as much time and dialog in the Hathaway film but it is in much the same proportion to Cogburn's as in this one. Finally, the whole Mattie - Rooster issue: many critics are saying that Mattie is more at the center here than in the Hathaway picture, which focused attention on John Wayne's Cogburn.
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Except here we don't have that connection. These two incidents combine to let the audience know that Cogburn's hidden agenda on the Chaney hunt is really Ned Pepper, he and Pepper have something of a feud going on - which information fills out the background detail for their final shoot-out. We never get to see Mattie tell Rooster that Chaney has linked up with Ned Pepper (later Rooster does remark the fact, but how did he learn of it?) 2 We don't get to hear Rooster's remarking how he shot Pepper through the upper lip (because he was aiming at the lower lip). The most irritating to me were a pair of lapses that are interconnected and combine to make an important point about the characters. As for the Coens' own re-interpretation of the Portis novel, what was most noticeable to me were the minor points simply dropped out of the story telling. Pepper can only match Duvall's self-aware determination - and he does - but he can't surpass it nor can he find another interpretation to set off against Duvall's.
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Far more to the point is Barry Pepper's interpretation of the desperate outlaw chief, Ned Pepper - it is pure Robert Duvall. Apparently Martin had the character down pat and there's nothing but to reproduce his interpretation. Dakin Matthews seems to struggle mightily not to recreate Strother Martin's interpretation of the horse-trader Stonehill - and fails. Two performance stand out as striking examples of reference to the original film.
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For instance, the shoot-out at the dug-out cabin was re-written for a night-scene, but the camera angles remain pretty much the high-elevation shots Lucien Ballard provided Hathaway, inter-cut with full body shots of people getting wounded and horses running (etc.)also similar to Ballard's. Approaching the characters and composition of the Coens' version without reference to the Hathaway film apparently proved impossible. The Coens' tampering with the novel is more subtle than Hathaway's film, but no less an interpretation. This is most clear in the dialog - the decision not to tamper with Portis' language was decisive for the making of that film.
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The Hathaway version, while tampering with details from the Portis original, remains strikingly true to its story and theme. The Coen Brothers certainly knew that, however much they want to 'go back to the source material,' their film would play against Hathaway's version. Let's get the comparisons with Henry Hathaway's version of the Charles Portis novel out of the way.