Halfway into True Grit, it would still not be clear if this film was going anywhere. A fourteen-year-old girl is keen to avenge the death of his father and take control of the finances with a determination and gnash that sits uneasily on her. She is fascinated by the eye-for-an-eye ethic of wild Arkansas as much as she relishes the public hanging of three criminals that are part of a daily spectre for citizens and wayfarers in Fort Smith. Aided partly by persuasion and partly by angst she seemed to have inherited from her climate, two very dissimilar men, often mean and clownish, join her in her mission to find her father’s killer. 

But somewhere down the middle, Ethan and Joel Coen come clean on their intentions. They are after all the proverbial and precocious Hollywood ‘outlaws’, like the men in True Grit, who take each genre and make it their own. In their last films, most notably in A Serious Man and No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers have done their best to tear away from each film from the usual aspirations into noirs, marked by some superlative performance from the leading actors. Here also, Mattie Ross (Steinfield) excels as the cocksure adolescent with a fetish for vengeance. Bridges’ Rooster Cockburn, the one-eyed US Marshall whose talks are taller than his murderous cherishes, is not half as assured as that of John Wayne, who played the part to the Oscars in 1969 in the first adaptation of Charles Pontis’ 1968 novel of the same name. But that exactly what the Coens want. They stay true to the novel and go away far from the Waynish self- assurance to chronicle a half-heroic tale of hunt, vengeance and retribution under the merciless skies of late-nineteenth-century Arkansas. Cockburn’s often brutal-often wobbly, the whiskey-soaked act is duly mismatched against Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who falls on and off with him with the emotional tardiness of an insecure woman. By the time they find Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) and Cokburn’s spittle spewing old nemesis (Barry Pepper), the three have encountered some of the worst excesses of the West, without however being able to relish much of its revered, naked heroism. 

In a country as forlorn as the West, the Coens often hint at the thin border not just between good and evil, which has been the motif of much of spaghetti-Western, but also between heroism and incredulity, between textbook stupidity and what it means to exhibit true grit in the face of monumental adversity. In the end and despite some old-style gunplay and manslaughter, the two men in the film can pass into the sunset with gumption than plain gore. And a quarter-century later, when Mattie returns to her home county in search of Cockburn, she learns that he is part of the cast of a Wild West Show, hinting at the tragic dénouement of a man who had, long ago saved her life without charging a penny for it. 

The film’s final scene, in which Mattie finds Cockburn a burial near the Prairies, is a solemn reminder of the antediluvian world of true heroes and how long dead, they have found a resting place only in the Wild. 

Review of True Grit | Rating: Very GoodDirector: Ethan and Joel Coen
Hailee Steinfield, Matt Damon, Jeff Bridges’, Josh Brolin