The Coen brothers' version of True Grit opens with a slow track in on a man lying dead on a street in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the 1870s.  In a voice-over, an older woman recounts the details of the man's death.  He was her father, and was shot down in cold blood by his hired hand, who then fled into the Choctaw Nation, beyond the reach of Arkansas law.  She, at the age of fourteen, decided to go after the man and bring him to justice.  Snow falls over the body, and snow will be a recurring visual motif in the film that follows.  It will become a quiet emblem of grace in a tale of violence and revenge.

The slow tracking shot and the narration and the gentle snowfall ask us to settle back and concentrate . . . on a story that will take its time in the telling, as most good stories do.  Joel and Ethan Coen are asserting that they have a real story to tell, a story worth hearing, and this assertion comes as shock in the context of most movies of our time, which assault us furiously with fast cutting and loud sounds, trying to get our attention by crude means, usually to hide the fact that that there will be no story on offer — just a series of sensations.

Visually, the film is structured around shots — beautiful images of deep spaces that we can enter into imaginatively.  This is extremely rare in modern films, which are generally structured around rapid sequences of shots, none of which is interesting or seductive in itself — it's only the fake excitement of the cutting that we're meant to respond to.  This works the way the spiel of a three-card monte dealer works — to distract us from the flim-flam he's trying to put over on us with his sleight-of-hand.

The performances of the actors make no explicit appeals to our judgment or affections.  Jeff Bridges, as Rooster Cogburn, snarls and mumbles his lines as though he doesn't much care if he's understood — but it's Cogburn who doesn't care, not Bridges.  Bridges is simply thoroughly absorbed in Cogburn.

Matt Damon, playing a Texas Ranger named La Boeuf who's a bit of a dolt, never puts quotes around his bombast or his insecurity, to let us know that he, Damon, is not that sort of fellow.  He puts the fellow before us as he is, with absolute conviction, and this makes for a spectacular pay-off when La Boeuf proves his mettle at the film's climax.  Having allowed us to take his faults seriously, Damon also allows us to take his redemption seriously.

Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie also makes no direct appeal to our goodwill.  Mattie is a pill in many ways, a plucky but very cold and judgmental little girl.  Her need and fear are never emphasized, her love for Cogburn is never articulated or sentimentalized in any way.  We are given the space to feel her emotional odyssey because we haven't been prompted to read it as such, haven't had our noses rubbed in it.

Almost every moment in the film that might have been milked for an obvious audience response — like Cogburn's heroic ride against the four bad men — is all but thrown away, in the sense that we aren't provided with that extra note of emphasis reminding us of the import of what we're watching, that little pause in which we're meant to cheer.  The tale proceeds as if it were happening without us, and that, by the paradox of storytelling, draws us deeper into it.  It's a tale that blossoms and clobbers us over the head only at the end of it, perhaps only after we've left the theater, resonating like a real experience of real things.

If you find, after seeing the film, that you love Mattie Ross and Reuben Cogburn and Ranger La Boeuf, it's not the result of a story committee in Hollywood telling you that they're lovable — it's the result of something that has happened in your own heart.

It takes a lot of skill to tell a story this way.  In the modern age, it takes even more courage.  Hollywood hates and despises its audience — believes it brings nothing to a film, except perhaps a recognition of the name of the property that's been adapted to the screen, and certainly not a human heart.

The Coen brothers, in True Grit, imagined an audience made up of real people, with real emotions, real moral and spiritual concerns — an audience that would bring as much to the table as their film brought, ready for a conversation about serious and wonderful things.

As it turns out, there was such an audience out there, ready for such a conversation — which is why True Grit became a surprise hit over the recent holidays.  That audience is still there.  It is still ready.  You can be sure, too, that Hollywood still hates and despises it, which is why, increasingly, audiences hate and despise most of what Hollywood has to offer.  Movie attendance in 2010 was the lowest it's been in fifteen years.

The Coen brothers are known for their dark humor and bleak view of the world, but in recent years they have become increasingly obsessed with the mystery of goodness.  In the desolation of a North Dakota winter, vicious killers stalk the land, and there suddenly is Marge Gunderson, a paragon of decency and courage.  Why?  Why is there a Marge Gunderson?

This is essentially a religious question, in the sense that it has no logical, rational answer.  The temptation of theology is to supply logical, rational answers to religious questions, but it's the unanswerable questions that move the heart and change lives.  That's why the Bible is long on stories and short on theology, why Jesus taught with parables instead of intellectual arguments.

The Coen brothers' film No Country For Old Men is almost a reprise of Fargo — without the comedy this time, and with a much darker and more terrifying view of the evil stalking the borderlands.  The figure of the good sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who seems to stand alone against the horror, is even more mysterious than Marge was.

He seems to possess some supernatural power over the Bardem character's pure wickedness — his very presence seems to be able to make the Bardem charcter vanish into thin air — but it's a power that even the Jones character doesn't understand.  There is a suggestion that his decency and courage are outdated virtues, on the verge of being overwhelmed by the world's evil.  And yet they linger . . .

In A Serious Man, the Coens take on the Book Of Job, the Bible's great story of a man who clings to righteousness in the face of an implacably destructive universe.  It makes no sense — it is, yet again, a mystery to be puzzled over.

In Charles Portis's novel True Grit, the Coens found a text ideally suited to their late-period themes.  A self-righteous and vengeful little girl meets up with a violent and none-too-virtuous law officer, and somehow they find a way to love each other.  Their mission of harsh justice is infected with grace, a grace neither of them really understands, except on a level beneath conscious thought.  They part ways after their adventure, but the little girl lives the whole rest of her life in the glow of one great act of love on the part of the least likely of men . . . a kind of redemption for both of them by the unexplainable appearance of goodness.

The Coens use the hymn “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms” as a musical motif throughout the film, and Iris Dement's recording of it comes at the film's end, summing it all up in a way.  The phrase “everlasting arms” is from the Old Testament, and is used in the hymn as an image of Christian salvation, but the use of the song here is not theological in any sense.  Mattie Ross's conscious religion is cold, judgmental and unforgiving — Rooster Cogburn's religion is non-existent.  There is no theology in what saves them, because what saves them is irrational.  The everlasting arms are just there, without explanation — the way Marge Gunderson is just there.

A key to all this can be found in the figure of Rabbi Marshak in A Serious Man.  He is the ancient and remote fount of all wisdom, but unavailable to the film's Job figure, who can't get an appointment to see him.  But his son is granted an interview after his bar mitzvah.  The old sage sighs and then, improbably and hilariously, quotes a line from a Jefferson Airplane song — “When the truth is found to be lies . . .”  And just when you expect wise council on this subject, the rabbi breaks off, trying to remember the names of the members of the Airplane.

It's well known that Sergio Leone stole the plot of Fistful Of Dollars from Kurosawa's Yojimbo, transposed it to the Old West and gave birth to the Spaghetti Western.  Leone's film was a big hit worldwide, and in a legal settlement over the plagiarism, Kurosawa was awarded the revenues from the film in most Asian markets.  Yojimbo had a been a big hit itself, mostly in Japan, but the profits to Kurosawa from Fistful Of Dollars exceeded those of the original by a considerable degree.  Kurosawa always regarded this as a stroke of great good fortune.

Leone fans like to point out how much he added to what he took from Kurosawa, but in fact it was very little.  Everything that's most startlingly “original” about Fistful Of Dollars was already present in the film it was based on.  The quirky visual style, mixing views of deep spaces with extreme and iconic widescreen close-ups, the jangly score, with odd instrumentation and occasional bombastic flourishes, the whole sardonic attitude towards genre, were invented by Kurosawa.  Calling Leone's style “operatic”, and thus linking it to specifically Italian sources, ignores the fact that Yojimbo is just as “operatic” in just the same ways.

Kurosawa's film was extremely radical for its time.  He was trying to re-imagine the samurai film, invest it with a modernistic attitude, while at the same time delivering the reliable pleasures of action set-pieces, but action set-pieces that were even bolder and more dazzling than those usually found in the genre.

As part of his strategy, Kurosawa emphasized the link between samurai films and American Westerns, which he loved and had studied carefully.  The story unfolds almost entirely on a traditional Western T-set, representing a town with a main street that ends at a cross street.  It's a Japanese town from around 1860, not an American one on the frontier in the same era, but its look and feel are familiar from any number of American Westerns.

The climactic showdown between the chief adversaries in Yojimbo deliberately evokes the traditional showdown in the street between gunslingers in a Western, and Kurosawa even introduces a pistol into the confrontation, to make the association, and the irony, clearer.

The film is basically a comedy, or satire, with interludes of action and dramatic seriousness.  Its mixed tone resembles to a degree that of Rio Bravo, which had come out a few years earlier and done terrific box office.  Yojimbo's comedy, though, is much less genial than the comedy of Hawks's great Western.  It has a dark and savage quality, and its fooling with its genre has a edge of malice, a deconstructive quality, as though it wanted to sweep the traditional samurai film into history.  Hawks's joshing with the Western genre is loving by comparison.

It was the sardonic edge, the dark comedy, the self-conscious and almost sarcastic attitude towards genre, that defined the Spaghetti Western of Sergio Leone, and Leone took all those qualities directly from Kurosawa's film.