Week 7: True Grit
Dir. Joel & Ethan Coen, 2010
110min
Pleasance Theatre
One does not expect a traditional exercise in genre filmmaking from the Coen Brothers, but their 2010 version of Charles Portis’ previously-filmed novel (in 1969 with John Wayne) is precisely that.
Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross is determined to track down Tom Chaney, the man who murdered her father, so she hires a coarse, drunken, recently disgraced U.S. Marshall named Rooster Cogburn to help her. Initially reluctant, Cogburn accepts Mattie’s job, and eventually her company on the journey. Also looking for Chaney is a pompous Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf, who is out to bring Chaney back to Texas so the killer can be tried for his crimes there.
Initially perturbed to find himself both manhunter and babysitter, Cogburn warms to his task by witnessing Mattie’s resolve, and by longing to prove himself LaBoeuf’s superior. The quest is a lively one full of wrong turns, bizarre digressions, comic vignettes, and moments of personal reckoning.
Jeff Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn received much well-deserved praise for standing strongly on his own, despite John Wayne’s considerable shadow. It is, however, Hailee Steinfeld’s film, and her willful, intelligent, duty-bound Mattie Ross is the point around which this whole story turns. Her performance is not that of a young actor hired simply because she fits the character’s mold. Behind all Mattie’s bluster and wit, she is still a child coping with a great loss, out to do what she feels is right by her father, and we can see it all in Steinfeld.
Punctuated with touches of the Coen Brothers’ style, humour, and dialogue, True Grit is a modern example of the kind of adventure Hollywood used to do best.