True Grit

The Coen brothers are the moral philosophers of American film. They have one subject: moral accounting. That’s why no matter what genre they seem to work in, they’re always doing crime stories.

The classic crime story is a heavyweight fight between a master criminal and a master cop. The middle of the story has an intense punch/counter-punch as each takes his best shots. When one wins at the end, usually the cop, we get the pleasure of a good heavyweight fight.

That’s fine for a lot of screenwriters. But the Coens have always known that you have to transcend your genre, because then your script or film is not only more popular, it has a chance to be great.

A transcendent crime story isn’t just about catching a criminal. It’s about tallying up what is owed over the course of a lifetime, with life and death consequences. The Coen’s Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and True Grit all play out this brutal accounting system.

True Grit is set in the old west, but it’s not a Western. The classic Western is all about nation building, transforming wilderness into civilization. Shane is a classic Western.

True Grit is crime in western clothes. Tom Chaney has murdered a girl’s father and he must pay with his life. The law is supposed to handle the moral accounting in society. But this time the law fails. So it falls to headstrong, 14-year-old Mattie to make sure the job is done. This gives the film a clear, strong desire line. And that is a crucial benefit when the hero and her allies, Marshall Rooster Cogburn and Agent LaBoeuf, go on a journey to track the killer down.

Accounting is also central to Mattie’s plan. This film is filled with bargaining. She’s a ferocious bargainer for her father’s horses. And she refuses to let Rooster shirk his responsibility. This is the deal we made, she insists, and you must keep your word.

Though essentially a crime story, True Grit uses the myth structure, with its series of tests on the road, to unfold the story and play out the accounting. As in the best myth stories, the hero brings her “family” – Rooster and LaBoeuf – along for the ride. The dramatic opposition comes from the series of bad guys they must fight on the road.

But the most important opposition thematically is within the family. Each conflict with the bad guys allows the family members to tally up his or her proper payment to the others. The true endpoint of the story is not whether they bring Tom Chaney to justice. It is whether these three main characters – Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf – will come to understand the true worth of each of the others.

In the final scene, Mattie has one last payment she must make to old Rooster. She can’t make it, and for someone with such a strong moral code this is tragic. It’s not the ending we want in this movie. But it’s the ending the movie has to have.

The Coens never sermonize. Their knowledge of the screenwriting craft is too great for that. Study True Grit and the rest of the Coen canon to learn how to convert your moral vision into characters and plot. Those techniques are one of the main ways you tell the world that you are a master of the craft.

Intolerable Cruelty

Intolerable Cruelty shows once again why combining love and comedy is among the most difficult tasks in fiction writing. Love wants to get close. Comedy wants to step back and make fun. If you don't find the right balance between the two, you're dead.

That's exactly what went wrong with Intolerable Cruelty. With all the smart satire and farcical comedy in this film, this is still at heart a love story between Miles and Marylin. Which means there's got to be real emotion. You can't just tell the audience that characters have feelings for each other. Emotion must be set up, nurtured, brought into the story carefully.

That doesn't happen here. One, Miles doesn't trust Marylin from the beginning, given that she is a total gold-digger. Two, Marylin doesn't trust Miles, given that he is the ultimate sleazy lawyer.

This is not a screwball comedy. But it does share the same story problem: how to make the love real while doing so much broad comedy. Screwball comedy knows you have give the two leads time together. And it has to be quiet time, where they can respond to the deepest part of the other person, so the audience can see that they are capable of love and not just pawns of the plot.

Intolerable Cruelty also fails to set up the comic plot properly. In a story about two master scam artists, the scams better be ingenious and the artists better be smart. But Miles is unbelievably dumb, leaving himself wide open to a woman he knows has only one desire, to take revenge against him.

This film has some very funny lines. But that is not enough. The key to any romantic comedy is setting the proper comic structure (for details, see the Love Story Class or the Comedy Class). Fail there, and nothing else is going to help.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

This modern-day Odyssey/Sullivan's Travels is a pleasant diversion. But the question that kept nagging me in the back of my mind was: O Brother, Why art thou? Using the myth structure for a new story is a fine technique, but you have to create something truly new. Otherwise it is literally paint-by-numbers. Here the pleasure is limited to recognizing the basic associations: look, there's the sirens, there's the cyclops, etc.

When you use a myth as a foundation for a story you are writing, the first thing you must do is look at the theme. Ask yourself: what can this classic story tell us about our world now? How does flipping it on its head create a whole new perspective?