True Grit

“You must pay for every­thing in this world, one way and anoth­er. There is noth­ing free… Except the grace of God.”

Set­ting out her stall over a soft, melan­cholic piano refrain, Mat­tie Ross clos­es the pro­logue to True Grit with faith in her heart and ven­om on her tongue. On her quest for ret­ri­bu­tion she’ll need to keep both in good stock.

The rhyth­mic chat­ter of train wheels segues gen­tly into chap­ter one, where a young Mat­tie (Hailee Ste­in­feld) watch­ful­ly and some­what anx­ious­ly acknowl­edges her arrived des­ti­na­tion through a front of glass and mettle.

She heads pur­pose­ful­ly to the local funer­al par­lour, where an open cas­ket con­firms her father’s death before for­mal­i­ties give way to mar­ket stall bar­ter­ing. Mat­tie deems the mortician’s self-val­u­a­tion to be too high, but set­tles on the con­di­tion that she will be allowed to bunk among the souls and saw­dust for the night. Wel­come to Coen country.

Long before Lar­ry Gopnik’s self-esteem took a kick in the toches and Norville Barnes rode his wheel to for­tune and back; before the Sog­gy Bot­tom Boys’ big break and even before Bernie Bernbaum’s dou­ble cross­ing, Joel and Ethan Coen take us all the way back to nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Fort Smith, a dusty South­ern kiln run by salty US Mar­shall Roost­er Cog­burn (Jeff Bridges), who bathes in whisky and wres­tles crooks when the mood strikes or, in this case, when the price is right.

For a tidy sum Roost­er agrees to help our lion­heart­ed, pig­tailed hero­ine track down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the slip­pery tran­sient who mur­dered her father for two of his Cal­i­for­nia gold pieces. They set out on horse­back into the vast, for­mi­da­ble beyond of the Indi­an Ter­ri­to­ries, joined by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon in a refresh­ing­ly self-effac­ing turn), a mut­ton chop-cheeked, spur-clink­ing Texas Ranger who’s out to set­tle his own score with Chaney.

Bridges is at his surly and love­able best here, ooz­ing mam­malian machis­mo while retain­ing a famil­iar, grand­fa­ther­ly aura. The eye­patch and Stet­son are bor­rowed, but Bridges tames this rough­neckin’ law­man with his own lar­i­at. Cer­tain­ly, the Duke would abide.

But the real star is Ste­in­feld. Hers is a curi­ous char­ac­ter caught up in a time­less tale, but far from being over­whelmed she takes her bigscreen debut in her short stride with a fear­less­ness that bor­ders on naïvety but is absolute­ly bet­ter for it.

At its essence True Grit is pure Amer­i­can fic­tion: its picaresque first-per­son nar­ra­tive proud­ly chan­nels Mark Twain and rev­els in the roman­ti­cised adven­ture of the wild west. It is can­did, direct and dark­ly humoured. At times it loads a sin­gle bul­let into a cham­ber and pis­tol-whips you so that each exhil­a­rat­ing hop is taint­ed by the thought that the next trig­ger click could blow you clean out of your com­fort zone. It is a joy­ous salute to the Coens’ bound­less dynamism and trusty bravura.

So why then – like a scoop of Rooster’s spe­cial recipe beans – does some­thing not quite set­tle right?

This is the broth­ers’ most acces­si­ble film in years, but in their eager­ness to do jus­tice to Charles Por­tis’ nov­el they have obscured their kinet­ic, odd­ball brand of yarn-spin­ning. Not entire­ly, per­haps, but enough to nig­gle. The result is a film that is nev­er less than riv­et­ing, but safer than we’ve come to expect from this most accom­plished and pro­lif­ic film­mak­ing duo.

Indeed, despite being fear­some scribes in their own right, the broth­ers’ cut and paste job of Por­tis’ ornate prose means that while the bristly, quick-fire ral­lies between our three unlike­ly ami­gos are white-hot on impact, the nov­el­ty of the dia­logue fades like scat­tered embers.

Grant­ed, True Grit is sea­soned with the occa­sion­al suck­er punch to remind you of the broth­ers’ sav­age sense of humour and abil­i­ty to deliv­er bewitch­ing char­ac­ter-dri­ven cin­e­ma, but as dec­o­ra­tive rib­bon is looped into a neat bow around the film’s final act, those hop­ing for some vin­tage Coen skull­dug­gery will find them­selves left wanting.