True Grit (Friday, December 24, 2010) (162)

The Coen Brother's True Grit is a new reinterpretation of the Charles Portis novel (which had been previously done, of course, in a 1969 film starring John Wayne). In this version, Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, a hard-drinking, go-it-alone U.S. Marshall who is hired by 14-year-old girl Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to hunt down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) who shot her father in cold blood.

As she working out the details of the arrangement with Rooster, Mattie is approached by LeBoeuf (Matt Damon), a Texas Ranger who has been hunting Chaney through several states for killing a senator in Texas. He tells her that he would find Cheney for her, but he would have to take the outlaw to Texas to be hanged. For reasons that are not totally clear, Mattie refuses and says that he would have to be hanged in Arkansas where her father was gunned down.

Neither Rooster nor LeBoeuf want Mattie tagging along with them (because she's a girl and they'd be going into dangerous Indian territory) so they agree to work together without her. She catches on to this and forces herself into their posse. The three don't work together well and LeBoeuf splits away from them ultimately, but his goal remains the same as theirs.

This is a very good western, but it's not much more than that. Just about every part of it feels like a rather timeless classic that could have been made now or 50 years ago. The cinematography by Roger Deakins is fabulous, balancing lens flares in the burnt-out desert shots and icy, snowy land shots to give an interesting harsh tone to the whole piece.

The Coens also employ a wonderful score by Carter Burwell, based on the American spiritual Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. That the score uses so much of the spiritual reminds me a lot of some of the classic scores by Dimitri Tiomkin to some of the best of the Howard Hawks or John Ford westerns. The musical highlight is a rendition of the spiritual by Iris DeMent (from her 2004 album Lifeline) over the closing credits. (And, of course, after O Brother, Where Art Thou, nobody would ever think the Coens didn't know how to find the most perfect country/bluegrass/Americana music and performers on the planet.)

The acting is good all around, but not totally amazing. I felt like Bridges was redoing his drunk cowboy role from Crazy Heart more than anything original... but that was a good impersonation of a drunkard, so it worked here too, to a degree. Damon plays LeBoeuf more like Tommy Lee Jones' Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove (or maybe all Texas Rangers talk exactly the same way) than anything particularly original, but he's good. I particularly liked Brolin and Barry Pepper (who plays another outlaw in the finale) who both feel fresh and original and like they're having lots of fun.

I guess I was rather hoping this film would do more than it did. It doesn't really open up more doors than the John Wayne movie and Mattie is just as annoying here as she was in that one. I was hoping for some more frank sexuality (maybe Mattie is threatened with rape out in Injun territory) or some sort of harder, tougher living perhaps. What the Coens give us is basically flawless, but not really interesting. There's nothing here to bite into and, in fact, the finale plays just as overdone as it did the first time around (I've never read the book, to be honest). This is a good film for their oeuvre, but not one I would come back to again and again in the future.

Stars: 2.5 of 4