True Grit (2010)

First, a confession. I never saw the original “True Grit” of 1969. In fact, I've never seen any of John Wayne's western classics. And I never saw the complete modern retake—I arrived five minutes into the showing. So, no fuss at what follows.


» Plot

Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfield), a fourteen-year-old farm girl from Arkansas with braided hair and a vendetta against her father's murderer, is looking to see justice done and a man swing. Unfortunately, the law is tied up with other things at the moment, so Mattie—not used to standing idly by—decides to hire a U.S. Marshal to track down her man. Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) seems to be just the candidate: he has “true grit,” and is “double tough,” though his love for whiskey occasionally unmoors him. And he is conveniently nearby—just down at the courthouse giving testimony.

If his sworn testimony is to be believed, Cogburn is not one to fool around with. But on the stand, Cogburn is a trite nervous: his one good eye skips around the courtroom as if looking for an escape route, while an angry attorney mincingly questions him on his career.

Attorney: “How many men have you shot since you became a marshal, Mr. Cogburn?”
Cogburn: “I never shot nobody I didn't have to.”
“That was not the question. How many?”
“Uh... shot or killed?”
“Let's restrict it to 'killed' so we may have a manageable figure.”

Satisfied with the marshal's effectiveness, Mattie hires him in her typical not-to-be-deterred fashion, unfazed by the fact that he, while recalling her offer to him, doesn't remember ever agreeing to it. With some twists and turns—including some uproariously brazen horse-dealing—the duo sets off on the warpath.


» Dialogue

Almost the first thing I noticed in “True Grit” was the dialogue. (There was much to notice.) The characters spoke with a genteel and idiomatic style that westerns writers would kill for. It wasn't just the smatterings of unusual archaisms and obsoletes—including some delightful legal jargon about a “writ of replevin” and “remitting”—and the ungrammatical strings of negatives that added flavor to the conversation, but the abundance of frontier phrases that you'll only ever hear from a redneck on the wrong side of a tombstone.

And the personality of the characters only strengthened this verbal confection. Mattie is headstrong, direct, and pointed to a fault. Confronted at one point with a man who bucks decorum by failing to rise when the lady approaches, she pointedly ignores him and converses with his more respectful companion—then, in departing, delivers the barb, “keep your seat, trash.” Over and again, her call-it-like-you-see-it personality adds a liveliness to the story.

Cogburn also amuses the viewer with his common-sense observations imbued with an almost unconscious scorn. An offer of coffee to his young employer results in a rejection just as pleasantly bitter:

Cogburn: “Give me your cup.”
Mattie: “I don’t drink coffee, thank you.”
“Well, now, what do you drink?”
“I'm partial to cold buttermilk.”
“Well, we ain't got none of that. We ain't got no lemonade neither!”


» Visuals, characters, setting

While the dialogue was superb, "True Grit" also stayed above average in other respects. The visuals were classic, and occasionally grandiose, ever keeping with the intended (and expected) tone of the movie and its story. The characters were believable and remarkably realistic—often comedic, but never caricatured. And the film's sometimes jarring representation of society on the frontier was both remarkable and utterly unapologetic.

Throughout the movie, non-whites were repeatedly presented in an unsympathetic, but probably historically accurate, manner. In an early hanging scene, two condemned white men were given a chance to speak their bit, while an Indian was roughly hooded and hanged as soon as he opened his mouth. When Cogburn enters a house, he despisedly thrusts some Indian children off of a porch with his boot as though kicking aside a stick of wood or a piece of garbage—and takes the time to do so again at his exit. A black boy is relegated to tending the horses, while a Chinese man runs a general store. In a genre born of blackface and WASP actors, these depictions offer a discomfiting but appreciated change.


» Language and gore

There was a small amount of profanity—not enough to pain my calloused ears, but enough to note. While there was a fair amount of shooting, hanging, and death and injury in general, it was always brief, not pervasive. In the most disconcerting scene, a gruesome and bloody brawl, a man loses first a set of fingers, and then his life—but all is over quickly.


» Overall

The conversation is reason enough to watch this movie; the writers deserve to have their names writ in gold. The film was coherent and cohesive, endlessly entertaining yet ever engaging. While I would warn the sensitive about some sanguine scenes, the production deserves a full five.