Brazen Saddles

Review: True Grit

Courage, tenacity, reckless determination: just a few implications of the Coens' newest film's title. The brothers' quarter-century body of work speaks to these qualities; their films throttle between comical eccentricity and bleakness verging on horror. Some are sure-headed while others quaver (often the lighter films like Burn after Reading and The Ladykillers). But they persevere into the curiouser and curiouser Wonderlands of small towns and the Wild West.

Their movies are masculine, focused on man's conviction. The film stock is often grainy, a deliberate "indie" touch. Their casts can verge on caricature, laced with colorful tics and regional vernacular. So where does True Grit land in this (simplified, of course) look at their career? It's the second adaptation of Charles Portis' novel, and a surprise major hit at the box office. Despite the prominence of notorious marshal Rooster Cogburn, True Grit is a woman's story.

Mattie looks back from middle age on her one experience riding with the men: her quest to avenge her father's murder. A girl of firmly braided hair and near-ministerial tongue, she hires Cogburn to hunt down the culprit Tom Chaney, and resolves to accompany him. Out in the wilderness, Mattie sees her Old Testament thinking realized with the eye-for-an-eye violence of their journey. Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross as an adult unaware she's only fourteen, or that she's entering a man's world. As her travel companions, Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon make ideal foils. Bridges is eager to get his hands dirty; he sputters and mumbles with comic panache, then drops the swagger instantly when the going gets rough. Damon plays the level-headed fool LaBoeuf with dignity, with a sweet paternal protectiveness toward Mattie. The story falters a little when they reach Chaney at last, the encounter too chance and the villain bland. But it's back on track with the requisite good guy-bad guy showdown.

I watched John Ford's 1939 film Stagecoach, possibly the first great Western, just after True Grit. Many reviewers find the Coens' work here more traditional than usual. They honor the genre, but with the toll that seventy years of Westerns have taken. Casualties are few in Stagecoach, and the horses are not sacrificed. But though True Grit's body count is lower than most Coen efforts, their contemporary lens records how random violence can be. Even the innocents who are spared will be wounded. Having grit wins shootouts, just like the good old days, but no one escapes the consequences.