Just watched the remake of “True Grit.” Not bad, but not as good as the original.
My wife and I were immensely distracted by the dialogue, which for every character was stilted and extremely formal, to the point of making everyone sound like they were acting poorly.
Most noticeable was the complete absence of contractions (I’m, don’t, won’t, etc.) but also some of the word choice and structure. This really stuck out with the outlaw characters who were portrayed as toothless scum of the earth, yet when they spoke it sounded like they were doing Shakespeare in the park.
I recall having the same issue with the TV series Deadwood a while back.
Is this a Coen brothers thing, maybe going for some particular effect, or is there some truth to the idea that everyone in the Old West spoke with such eloquence and formality?
Not a definitive answer, but a good starting point:
Of course, it’s going to come off as stylized and probably takes some license for poetic reasons rather than fully historical ones, but it’s still good writing (Deadwood even more so)–artful, engaging, even beautiful. The farthest thing from what I’d ever call a distraction, though YMOV.
The dialogue in the original book is that way. (And if you will think back, in the original movie as well.)
And no, people didn’t speak that formally back then. (You need only read Huckleberry Finn to disabuse yourself of that notion.) And yes, contractions had been invented and were in full, glorious use. (Again, see Huckleberry Finn.) While polite discourse was more formal then than now (particularly for someone like Matty, who was Raised Right), it was not so formal as to require elimination of contractions.
One of my big gripes about the movies Gettysburg and Gods and Generals is that the screenwriters (or maybe the author – I haven’t read the books) confuse formal writing voices with the voices used in informal dialogue. Just because people in the 19th century wrote in florid prose doesn’t mean they spoke that way.
I think Portis makes the same mistake. Even so, I enjoy the formal speech in the book and in both movie versions of True Grit. I can’t quite explain why, but it makes the witty banter between the characters more funny to me.
Another vote for the language being one of the best parts of the film. I found it beautiful, and for the most part brilliantly delivered. The important thing is, and this is emphasised in the remake, the story is the reminiscences of Mattie Ross, and the characters are speaking the way she remembers them to have done, not the way they actually would have done. Mattie clearly would have spoken that way, but she was a somewhat unusual child, and no doubt an equally unusual adult.
The dialog was also in the first movie. The original did use plenty of the dialog from the book and Mattie’s lack of using contractions was commented on in the Mad Magazine parody.
Now, as is often the case, the question comes from the unspoken assumption that everything has to be a realistic portrayal of people in the past. It doesn’t and in this case, clearly isn’t. Portis wrote the dialog the way he did for what’s known is “dramatic effect” – to make it seem interesting and exciting to the audience. It was no intended to be an actual portrayal of how people spoke back then. Questioning it on the basis of “is that how people really spoke back then?” is akin to questioning “was there really a Mattie Ross whose father was killed by Tom Cheney and who hired sheriff Rooster Cogburn to track him down?”
This is a work of fiction. I found that the dialog made the characters more interesting a vivid. I suppose you might prefer they be dull and uninteresting, but speak “accurately.” :rolleyes:
I had teachers growing up (the 1960s, not the 1860s) who did not allow us to use contractions. They believed that was a part of bring Raised Right.
They also forbade ballpoint pens because fountain pens forced better penmanship. And made us call each other by our full given names, not by familiar versions or nicknames. And we had classes in basic etiquette. And the teachers would puke if we began a sentence with a conjunction.
It was a more formal time, even fifty years ago.
I’m sure the answer is in the book, but the Coens also write in a distinctive style and the dialogue in True Grit was of a piece with their other work in some ways. They write to be interesting, not to be realistic, and I think they’re very successful.
Another vote for the dialouge being great.
I often get annoyed when characters in a film set long ago talk like they do in the Sopranos.
No, it’s not the same as questioning whether there really was a Mattie Ross, etc. That’s asinine. Roll eyes right back at you.
It’s clear that some, maybe most viewers, admire the dialogue as beautiful and poetic. Fine. Glad it worked out that way for you. For me and the wife, not so much. We were trying to immerse ourselves in a western, with beautiful settings, as well as authentic-looking buildings, clothing, guns, and so forth, but the dialogue struck us as decidedly unauthentic. If you want to say it was inauthentic for a stylistic reason and you liked it, fine for you.
Now I’m hearing from some of you that, yes, people did speak more formally back then because of the way they were raised and how they learned to read. And the idea that it was the girl’s recollection of how they spoke makes sense too.
But noticing the formal dialogue and being distracted by it doesn’t mean I’m some kind of boob who expects movies to be exactly true to life. If Rooster Cogburn was carrying an AK-47 (because the Coen brothers thought that was cool) and I noted that it seemed odd and distracting, would that mean I just wanted the movie to be dull and uninteresting? What if Mattie were talking Valley Girl and Cogburn was calling everybody “Dude?” Would there be anything wrong with noticing that and saying that it distracts from the movie?
Of course not, but in both those cases, the anachronism is real and undeniable, and the sheer shock value of such an historic inaccuracy would be enough to distract anyone.
But that’s very different from what you said in the OP, which was simply that it was distracting because of how it felt, in that you weren’t basing your impression on something factual (you even acknowledge as much) but based on the set of assumptions and expectations you made going in–that westerns are “supposed” to “sound” a certain way.
The degree to which the film stylizes the dialogue is open to debate, but there’s plenty of evidence that people were prone to communicating in ways that may seem more florid or formal than what we’re used to hearing now. That doesn’t make you a boob for not liking or appreciating it; but let’s be honest–almost all screenplays (dramas, comedies, thrillers) have casts of characters who are vastly more articulate or well-spoken than their real-life counterparts would be. That why it’s art and not reality TV. To get hung up on the dialogue when it’s one of the most artful (carefully crafted) things about the film just because it doesn’t feel right to you does sound like you’re setting the bar a bit high in the verisimilitude you’re expecting.
Well, that’s where we’ll have to disagree. I don’t think I was setting the bar high at all. This isn’t nitpicking about the type of gun used or a lamp from the wrong era by the bedside. Verisimilitude is a big part of any movie that’s not an outright fantasy, and obviously the film makers go to great lengths to achieve it in most categories. When they choose not to do so with the dialogue, that’s jarring to me even if the dialogue actually is beautifully written. Not jarring to you apparently, but it takes me out of the moment and reminds me over and over again that I’m watching some actors on a set, as if I kept seeing the boom mike overhead.
I understand that people may have spoken more formally then, but everyone here seems to be agreeing that they didn’t speak* that* formally and that the Coen brothers did this for artistic effect.
Never said that. Let’s not make assumptions about my assumptions. I never thought they were supposed to sound a certain way, only that their sound wouldn’t strike me as unusual or out of place. I’m not some diction expert who would carp about accents and word usage. Just a movie watcher who doesn’t want to think “that was an odd way for a toothless outlaw to say that” throughout the whole movie.
So apparently the Coen brothers weren’t going for verisimilitude. Okay. Their choice as artists. My choice as the moviegoer to like it or not.
That’s too big of a generalization. Filmmakers often don’t go for the maximum level of verisimilitude, and that maybe more true of dialogue than anything else.
All movie dialogue is unrealistic. See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealisticDictionIsUnrealistic
I am going to take a wild guess that you are not familiar with the oeurve of the Coen Brothers. Without exception, their dialogue is noted for being stylized, their characters often slightly detatched or deranged, and the worlds that they create in their films askew if not almost completely absurd. That they were able to use so much of Portis’ dialogue unabridged speaks to how well suited this material was for them to adapt (and they kept the original ending without the gutting it received in the Hathaway film, which was bolt and thematically true.) In terms of the props, the setting, and conditions, the film was remarkably accurate (far more so than the former film); when the Coens elected to use the stylized dialogue, it was an intentional choice. See other Coen movies like O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?, Miller’s Crossing, and The Hudsucker Proxy.
As a point of fact, I strongly doubt you can point to a single movie set in the American Western genre in which the dialogue actually reflects the use of language at that time and place (and if they did, it would sound absurd to modern viewers, like a Yosemite Sam cartoon). The anachronism generally isn’t noticed because it is in our modern vernacular, but the Coens (and in the case of Deadwood, David Milch) used an intentionally stylized vernacular to create a sense that the viewers are observing a story that is not in our world. This is nothing new; I’m morally certain that Richard, Duke of Glouchester, never made an eloquent speech about his jealously and elaborate plans to ascend to the head of the Plantagenet dynasty and take the throne of England. Nor (if he ever existed) did the son of King Hamlet of Denmark make so poetic soliloquies while scheming and plotting revenge upon his father’s murderer. I doubt two con men were ever so eloquent as the Duke and the Dauphin, and even in modern films people do not speak in life the way they do in film.
Stranger
Count me among those who enjoyed the dialogue–it made the film. What’s more, between True Grit and Deadwood, I now find that it sometimes doesn’t ‘sound right’ when I watch a period piece where people don’t talk so formally.
I suspect that this is true - speech is more accurate in the modern “True Grit” than in most recent Westerns. 19th century letters and writings by even “common folk” can come across as stilted and formal to modern readers.
Portis’ book is tremendous. The first movie didn’t begin to do it justice.
Even though the settings couldn’t be more different, the dialogue in “True Grit” reminded me of the dialogue in Damon Runyan’s stories about gamblers and lowlives in New York.
The accents were completely different, but in each case, the characters are ill-educated riffraff trying very hard to sound educated and eloquent.
Here’s a previous thread in which the lack of contractions in the dialogue in True Grit is discussed:
And here’s a link that I posted in that thread:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2873
It’s from Language Log, a blog where most of the contributors are professors of linguistics. They say that it’s not true that people in the nineteenth century didn’t use contractions. The makers of the film might have thought that they were being realistic in the dialogue, but they weren’t.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I said. And they could have chosen to stylize something else, like clothing maybe, to indicate that we’re “observing a story that is not in our world.” They chose to go for a reasonable level of verisimilitude with everything else but a stylized dialogue.
We can dispense with the petty declarations that all movie dialogue is unrealistic. Of course it is. Movies are unrealistic. They’re movies, not news footage from the 1860s. I never asked for ultra-realism; I only pointed out that the choice of this dialogue stuck out as fake sounding to me, more so than other choices they could have made that might be equally inaccurate in a historic sense but still wouldn’t leap off the screen to me as being so.
My question’s been answered. (Or should I say, “My interrogatory, such as it is, has been provided a response that I deem to be sufficient.”) The rest is arguing about whether you like it as an artistic choice or not. I vote not and am greatly outnumbered. Carry on.