You’d have to go all the way back to the recut version of their first film, Blood Simple, to find an example of Joel and Ethan Coen playing it this straight. And even then, not really. With True Grit, my favorite movie of 2010, the Coens and their longtime collaborators feast upon an iconic, simple text and masticate like the champion craftsmen they are.
A straightforward tale of justice, revenge and redemption in the hazy, collectively half-remembered fairytale land known as “The West,” 14 year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) teams up with Federal Marshall Rueben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and a Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) known only as “Le Boeuf,” on a quest from a pestilent town on the verge of industry to the brutal, harsh frontier. Put simply, three great characters (some sillier than others) get on their horses and ride.
All the recognizable beats are here: campfire tales, sharpshooting challenges, cabin standoffs and showdown charges, all presented with a spin of hyperactive reality we’ve come to expect from the Coen Brothers. Violence comes without warning, bluntly and messily, yet still framed beautifully. Roger Deakins’ elegant photography and Carter Burwell’s romantic score underscores this disconnect, emphasized even more so by the Coens’ dialogue.
As remarkable as the great outdoors are, it is this play with language, richly delivered by Bridges, Damon and Steinfeld, that is the star of the show in True Grit. Apart from being very funny, there is a musicality to the mannered, olde tyme talk. Steinfeld in particular delivers paragraphs of speech replete with SAT words, Latin phrases and sharp entendres. Not since Tom Hanks’s G.H. Dorr, PhD, from the underappreciated The Ladykillers have the Coens’ love of verbiage found such a worthy delivery method.
The tagline of True Grit, such that there is one, is "Punishment Comes One Way or Another." It is this aspect of inevitablility that enables the Coens divert such precise focus to "their part of the sandbox," to paraphrase from their No Country For Old Men Oscar speech. The basic story of True Grit has been handed down through generations of frontiersmen - a paegant ready for a performance by virtuosi.
So you put all this in a pot over a fire and stir it around and, somehow, you get more than the sum of its parts. Dazzling filmmaking, yes, but also a real, tender story The moments that make up this movie vary from the merely great to the truly sublime. It is a "good old fashioned Western," which, by the very nature of its existence, makes it a notable thing. Its quill is dipped in the mysterious, magical ink of America's near-holy myths, then applied by the steady hands of masters.
