True Grit (***3/4)

Somehow, two of the year’s best movies are both taken from novels set in backwoods Arkansas about unusually self-possessed teenage girls on a manhunt. In Winter’s Bone, Jennifer Lawrence plays one looking for her father. In this Coen Brothers adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, Hailee Steinfeld plays one looking for the man who killed her father, then fled.

The posters for the film understandably tout the big names, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. But Steinfeld is the star of the movie, and her feature-film debut is arguably the equal of Lawrence’s performance. Steinfeld convincing renders Mattie’s erudite speech, which includes lines like, “My brother is a child and my mother is indecisive and hobbled by grief.” That’s by way of explaining why she, a 14-year-old, is the one seeking justice. Revenge might technically describe her quest, but “justice” seems more apt for the dispassionate Mattie. She’s not hobbled by grief or much of anything else, and as a character is nearly impossible to resist. Her sly negotiation over some horses her father had agreed to purchase is as entertaining as anything in the movie.

Bridges is Rooster Cogburn, the “pitiless man” played by John Wayne in the 1969 adaptation of Portis’s tale. He also gets some of the choicest dialogue (much of it taken from Portis’s novel), even if, in Bridges’s Nick Nolte-ish gravelly delivery, it’s not entirely intelligible. Rooster, frequently drunk, is the opposite of LaBoeuf, the Texas ranger Damon plays. Seeing his clothing, Mattie deadpans, “We have no rodeo clowns in Yell County.” And off the three of them go, quarrelsomely hunting the same quarry through dangerous country lovingly shot by the Coens and their director of photography, Roger Deakins. Deakins also shot last year’s A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men, and other movies for the brothers.

This film lacks the sometimes-studied quirkiness of most of the Coens’ movies and therefore will be among their most accessible. Even if it retains Portis’s grim worldview, it’s tempered by his sense of humor, which is delightful because all of the characters are playing it straight. Thus it’s less of a downer than No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers film to which it might otherwise be compared. I found the setup for Mattie’s adventure more appealing than the more “western” part of the film, but even so this part avoids many of the expected clichés. Ending with an elderly Mattie, absent from the 1969 version, as the movie does, might seem odd, but the flashback structure is taken from the book. Although her narration earlier lets us know Mattie will survive her quest, the instantaneous passage of the decades ends the film on a mildly melancholy note.

IMDB link

viewed 12/15/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 12/15–23/10