At this point in the early 2010s, Joel and Ethan Coen were hot off a critical winning streak (No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man), and Takashi Miike had spent the past decade(s) willfully mired in the giddy malevolence of gonzo genre fare. Viewed at a distance, the former’s True Grit (2010) and the latter’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011) might seem like rose-tinted romps through their countries’ most iconic stylistic playgrounds (not to mention fertile ground for statuettes), but hindsight isn’t always 20/20, and the two films’ classical prestige surfaces are largely pretext for characteristically ruthless examinations of the low value placed on life in these periods.
"The Western and the samurai film are not as temporally confined as film enthusiasts like to think."
The Western and the samurai film are not as temporally confined as film enthusiasts like to think. The lion’s share of the former takes place between the end of the Civil War and the proliferation of the automobile, but some of the genre’s most inventive entries observe the erosion of its symbols and signs throughout the 20th century. Samurai films are usually set during the Tokugawa (a.k.a. Edo) era when Japan was under military rule by the eponymous shogunate, a range of more than two hundred years (1603-1868). Regardless of which historical axis it chooses to hinge upon, any film that sports these labels will earn them by engaging (through either deconstruction or implementation) with the trappings of a period piece.
Case(s) in point: two self-consciously classical but by no means nostalgic entries to these genres, which wear their various signifiers (ritual notions of honour and masculinity, tools of imperialism, the consequences of a nation’s history) with a gusto that tests their fixity.
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Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai–– originally shot and released in 3D––begins with foreboding images of the architectural designs that will gaze down upon the film’s violent proceedings; a cow with a rope cleaving its face like a devilish grin, a fiery red bird with a rust-tarnished wingspan, yawning archways, constricting door frames, and an empty suit of armour whose helm is suspended between a laugh and a scream. This attention to spatial detail is a formal reflection of its narrative focus; Hara-Kiri takes place at a point in history––the early 1600s, in which the new government ushered in an unprecedented era of peace, rendering thousands of samurai obsolete––when these penniless ronin began to show up on the doorsteps of feudal palaces, asking permission to end their purposeless lives within their grounds, securing a higher spiritual honour in death.
Whether their convictions were genuine or not, the houses would either employ them out of sympathy or give them money to mollify their suicidal intent, inspiring a trend of feigning seppuku for charity. The house that Motome (Eita Nagayama) wanders into in desperate search of 3 ryō to secure a doctor for his ailing family has caught onto this trend, and its retainers are out to make a grisly example of the first unlucky ronin to come knocking.
The cautionary tale of Motome’s fate is conveyed to his father-in-law Hanshiro (Ichikawa Ebizo XI) when he shows up with this same request in the opening scene, presenting himself as a stranger. The film’s narrative structure of recollection––carried over from the original––strikes a rare balance between hushed, procedural mystery and fragmentary melodrama, retroactively filling in the emotional gaps in its performers’ hypnotic and emphatic expressions.
As bodies begin to pile up, the collective weight of the codes and traditions Miike’s film challenges and dramatizes overwhelms the proceedings, lending an ideological urgency to Hanshiro’s mission as it reaches its logical conclusion. A towering totem of these expired principles is polished and refurbished by the house once the corpses are swept aside; “We have restored everything to its proper place.” The master of the house is only glimpsed in the final scene, in which he admires the armour’s lustre. His lackeys call it the pride of their noble house, bowing en masse in perpetual deference to arbitrary law.
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True Grit’s opening passages have the tone of a fable. Carter Burwell’s rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” (which will become the main leitmotif) accompanies the adult voice of Mattie Ross, who adroitly speaks to us across time as her father’s corpse comes into gradual focus: “You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another. Nothing is free except the grace of God.” This sequence functions as both overture and mission statement, setting into motion the film’s sense of steady, pre-ordained momentum (the following shot sees Mattie watching the town roll into view from the window of a train).
Her declaration rings twofold; throughout the film, aspirations to justice are challenged by the demands of capital, and every character’s sense of honour grates against the impulse to protect what’s theirs. The opening sequence of Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) financially courting Reuben Cogburn (Jeff Bridges)––the tough-as-nails bounty hunter whose take-no-prisoners reputation gave the novel its title––is set against her efforts to tie up the loose ends of her father’s affairs, and in both cases, Mattie demonstrates her unflappable capacity to haggle and chisel. As satisfying as it is demoralizing (for no child should have to be that well-versed in contract law), the young girl’s pugilistic wit sets her apart from the others, who more comfortably fit the Coen’s regular cast of needling, pathetic hucksters.
"Like Death of a Samurai, True Grit is also concerned with the steely fronts and macho bluster that people wear as performative armour."
How Mattie makes it through the events of the film with her devout faith intact is a genuine mystery, a testament either to her force of will or her willful self-delusion. At no point is the principled young girl able to rise above the pointless atrocity that surrounds her (nor is she expected to); she merely puts her head down, swallows her revulsion, and plows her way through.
The Coen brothers have packaged this bleak story of frail people navigating an apathetic world of all-encompassing violence and greed in the cinematic grammar of nostalgia for tradition. The film is haunted by the romantic possibilities of the fictional Old West its directors grew up with––a world that shelters its young and punishes its evildoers, the train collapsing the distances a horse can’t run, a bounty hunter doing the dirty work that would stain the hands of justice––colliding time and again with the fundamental pettiness of American life.
Like Death of a Samurai, True Grit is also concerned with the steely fronts and macho bluster that people wear as performative armour. Reuben and the oafish Texas ranger LaBeouf (Matt Damon) put on peacocking shows for the young girl, whose own cultivation of a harsh exterior has lent her the clarity of vision to see the men for what they are. Fittingly, when Mattie tries to track Reuben down years after he saved her life, she finds that he’s joined a travelling Wild West show, staving off irrelevance as the world becomes unrecognizable to both of them.
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In the sixties when these stories were first projected on screen, explicit revisionism (cultural, generic, ideological) was still relatively new. As time has shown us over and over, anything bold and vital will probably be subsumed by the mainstream; fast forward to the early 2010s (or even to today), and True Grit is one of the only Westerns made this century to not comfortably fit the revisionist mould, while Jidaigeki narratives have fallen out of prestige favour entirely.
How is it that both of these films feel so fresh and vital? These filmmakers each wield the visual language of classicism as trojan horses for forthright, unembellished excavations of cultural morass. Their attention to psychological, architectural, and institutional period detail grounds them in the textures of life and death, distilling decades of formal innovations down to those bare essentials. Like most of the best remakes, they reflect the cultural context their originals emerged from and the contemporary moment that allowed their rebirth––whether their settings have been updated to match that or not––, harbouring the personal and the historical side-by-side. The anxieties underscoring both of these stories, which colour any return to a narratively plentiful and temporally specific source, are summarized by the aging Mattie Ross’s final, tossed-off observation: “Time just gets away from us.”
At this point in the early 2010s, Joel and Ethan Coen were hot off a critical winning streak (No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man), and Takashi Miike had spent the past decade(s) willfully mired in the giddy malevolence of gonzo genre fare. Viewed at a distance, the former’s True Grit (2010) and the latter’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011) might seem like rose-tinted romps through their countries’ most iconic stylistic playgrounds (not to mention fertile ground for statuettes), but hindsight isn’t always 20/20, and the two films’ classical prestige surfaces are largely pretext for characteristically ruthless examinations of the low value placed on life in these periods.
"The Western and the samurai film are not as temporally confined as film enthusiasts like to think."
The Western and the samurai film are not as temporally confined as film enthusiasts like to think. The lion’s share of the former takes place between the end of the Civil War and the proliferation of the automobile, but some of the genre’s most inventive entries observe the erosion of its symbols and signs throughout the 20th century. Samurai films are usually set during the Tokugawa (a.k.a. Edo) era when Japan was under military rule by the eponymous shogunate, a range of more than two hundred years (1603-1868). Regardless of which historical axis it chooses to hinge upon, any film that sports these labels will earn them by engaging (through either deconstruction or implementation) with the trappings of a period piece.
Case(s) in point: two self-consciously classical but by no means nostalgic entries to these genres, which wear their various signifiers (ritual notions of honour and masculinity, tools of imperialism, the consequences of a nation’s history) with a gusto that tests their fixity.
--
Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai–– originally shot and released in 3D––begins with foreboding images of the architectural designs that will gaze down upon the film’s violent proceedings; a cow with a rope cleaving its face like a devilish grin, a fiery red bird with a rust-tarnished wingspan, yawning archways, constricting door frames, and an empty suit of armour whose helm is suspended between a laugh and a scream. This attention to spatial detail is a formal reflection of its narrative focus; Hara-Kiri takes place at a point in history––the early 1600s, in which the new government ushered in an unprecedented era of peace, rendering thousands of samurai obsolete––when these penniless ronin began to show up on the doorsteps of feudal palaces, asking permission to end their purposeless lives within their grounds, securing a higher spiritual honour in death.
Whether their convictions were genuine or not, the houses would either employ them out of sympathy or give them money to mollify their suicidal intent, inspiring a trend of feigning seppuku for charity. The house that Motome (Eita Nagayama) wanders into in desperate search of 3 ryō to secure a doctor for his ailing family has caught onto this trend, and its retainers are out to make a grisly example of the first unlucky ronin to come knocking.
The cautionary tale of Motome’s fate is conveyed to his father-in-law Hanshiro (Ichikawa Ebizo XI) when he shows up with this same request in the opening scene, presenting himself as a stranger. The film’s narrative structure of recollection––carried over from the original––strikes a rare balance between hushed, procedural mystery and fragmentary melodrama, retroactively filling in the emotional gaps in its performers’ hypnotic and emphatic expressions.
As bodies begin to pile up, the collective weight of the codes and traditions Miike’s film challenges and dramatizes overwhelms the proceedings, lending an ideological urgency to Hanshiro’s mission as it reaches its logical conclusion. A towering totem of these expired principles is polished and refurbished by the house once the corpses are swept aside; “We have restored everything to its proper place.” The master of the house is only glimpsed in the final scene, in which he admires the armour’s lustre. His lackeys call it the pride of their noble house, bowing en masse in perpetual deference to arbitrary law.
--
True Grit’s opening passages have the tone of a fable. Carter Burwell’s rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” (which will become the main leitmotif) accompanies the adult voice of Mattie Ross, who adroitly speaks to us across time as her father’s corpse comes into gradual focus: “You must pay for everything in this world, one way or another. Nothing is free except the grace of God.” This sequence functions as both overture and mission statement, setting into motion the film’s sense of steady, pre-ordained momentum (the following shot sees Mattie watching the town roll into view from the window of a train).
Her declaration rings twofold; throughout the film, aspirations to justice are challenged by the demands of capital, and every character’s sense of honour grates against the impulse to protect what’s theirs. The opening sequence of Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) financially courting Reuben Cogburn (Jeff Bridges)––the tough-as-nails bounty hunter whose take-no-prisoners reputation gave the novel its title––is set against her efforts to tie up the loose ends of her father’s affairs, and in both cases, Mattie demonstrates her unflappable capacity to haggle and chisel. As satisfying as it is demoralizing (for no child should have to be that well-versed in contract law), the young girl’s pugilistic wit sets her apart from the others, who more comfortably fit the Coen’s regular cast of needling, pathetic hucksters.
"Like Death of a Samurai, True Grit is also concerned with the steely fronts and macho bluster that people wear as performative armour."
How Mattie makes it through the events of the film with her devout faith intact is a genuine mystery, a testament either to her force of will or her willful self-delusion. At no point is the principled young girl able to rise above the pointless atrocity that surrounds her (nor is she expected to); she merely puts her head down, swallows her revulsion, and plows her way through.
The Coen brothers have packaged this bleak story of frail people navigating an apathetic world of all-encompassing violence and greed in the cinematic grammar of nostalgia for tradition. The film is haunted by the romantic possibilities of the fictional Old West its directors grew up with––a world that shelters its young and punishes its evildoers, the train collapsing the distances a horse can’t run, a bounty hunter doing the dirty work that would stain the hands of justice––colliding time and again with the fundamental pettiness of American life.
Like Death of a Samurai, True Grit is also concerned with the steely fronts and macho bluster that people wear as performative armour. Reuben and the oafish Texas ranger LaBeouf (Matt Damon) put on peacocking shows for the young girl, whose own cultivation of a harsh exterior has lent her the clarity of vision to see the men for what they are. Fittingly, when Mattie tries to track Reuben down years after he saved her life, she finds that he’s joined a travelling Wild West show, staving off irrelevance as the world becomes unrecognizable to both of them.
--
In the sixties when these stories were first projected on screen, explicit revisionism (cultural, generic, ideological) was still relatively new. As time has shown us over and over, anything bold and vital will probably be subsumed by the mainstream; fast forward to the early 2010s (or even to today), and True Grit is one of the only Westerns made this century to not comfortably fit the revisionist mould, while Jidaigeki narratives have fallen out of prestige favour entirely.
How is it that both of these films feel so fresh and vital? These filmmakers each wield the visual language of classicism as trojan horses for forthright, unembellished excavations of cultural morass. Their attention to psychological, architectural, and institutional period detail grounds them in the textures of life and death, distilling decades of formal innovations down to those bare essentials. Like most of the best remakes, they reflect the cultural context their originals emerged from and the contemporary moment that allowed their rebirth––whether their settings have been updated to match that or not––, harbouring the personal and the historical side-by-side. The anxieties underscoring both of these stories, which colour any return to a narratively plentiful and temporally specific source, are summarized by the aging Mattie Ross’s final, tossed-off observation: “Time just gets away from us.”