Starring: Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 110 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
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The Coen brothers’ True Grit is a film to savour, a masterly adaptation of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel of the same name about murder and retribution set in the post-Civil War American frontier in the late 1870s. No effort has been spared in recreating the period, which is evoked through rich visuals, authentic locations, and starkly unadorned costumes. But the most remarkable feature of this ‘ripping tale’ told in the time-honoured tradition of the Western, is the profound complexity of its deceptively simple story, and the sonorous, biblical poetry of the characters’ language.
The narrator of the story is Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a 14 year-old girl, who travels to Fort Smith, Arkansas, in a search for rough justice, after the murder of her beloved father by a ruthless killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin).
Opinionated, intrepid, and morally resolute, Mattie brow-beats a Fort Smith businessman who seeks to capitalise on her father’s murder, and with a swag of cash in hand, purchases both a fine black horse and the reluctant services of Reuben ‘Rooster’ Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a one-eyed, overweight, alcoholic US Marshall, who she is told always gets his man.
Also in pursuit of Cheney for another murder is the verbose Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), a strange mixture of brutish gentlemanliness, who though scornful of a young girl attempting to do a man’s work, suggests to Mattie that he and Cogburn team up together. This way the reward offered in Texas for the killer’s capture can be shared.
Mattie refuses, insisting that she is Cogburn’s employer, and that Cheney by rights should be brought to justice and hanged in Arkansas for her father’s murder. When La Boeuf and Cogburn leave early next morning without her, Mattie pursues the two men, as hungry for adventure as she is morally outraged by Cheney’s crime and Cogburn’s betrayal. LaBoeuf treats her like a child, but Cogburn through his alcoholic fog can see beyond her years.
A rapprochement of sorts sees all three in pursuit of Cheney, who they learn has teamed up with the equally ruthless outlaw ‘Lucky’ Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper), thus beginning a testing journey into Oklahoma territory and courage that will indelibly imprint itself on Mattie, and change her forever.
Westerns have the rich potential to become parables about life, and how people do and should behave, and True Grit, much like the Coen brothers’ other ‘western’ No Country For Old Men, delivers this, unobtrusively, in spades.
Much of the film’s success is due to the charismatic presence of Mattie, played with astonishing complexity and power by newcomer, 14 year-old Hailee Steinfeld. Her use (and that of the other actors) of the archaic, eloquent language that has come down to us from letters written during the Civil War and the almost Shakespearean speech patterns of great men such as Lincoln, has the ability to transport the viewer into another world, where such language denotes human lives lived according to, or in opposition to, great moral values founded on biblical precepts.
True Grit begins with the first part of a quote from Proverbs: The wicked flee when no one pursues; but the righteous are as bold as a lion’, and it can be argued, as the filmmakers seem be doing in their homily based on Portis’ novel, that this aphorism not only underpins American notions of justice in the past, but continues to haunt America today.
Laced with wry humour, True Grit is a tale about a brave, self-righteously resourceful and tenacious young girl, who sets out to avenge her father’s murder by bringing his killer to justice, and watching him strangle at the end of a rope in accordance with the directive ‘an eye for an eye’, this time taken from the Book of Deuteronomy.
Whatever ‘meaning’ one takes away from this thoughtful, beautifully realised contemplation of America past and perhaps present, is, as with all works of art, up to the viewer or reader.
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