Gritty, Gritty, Bang, Bang

True Grit is the only John Wayne movie I saw in a theater. I was 8 years old. My parents were not John Wayne fans, although I suspect my father may have harbored some admiration for him, the way a lot of men do. My parents' politics were quite farther to the left than Wayne's and things in American in 1969 were very politically divided (sound familiar?).

As a child of the NJ suburbs, I found the whole Western thing quite exotic, but with notable exceptions (Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the HBO series Deadwood) I find it an easy genre to overlook, no doubt in part because so many of the female roles are so uninteresting to me, mostly a lot of prostitutes -- including Mrs. Miller -- and hardscrabble ma's.

Now come the Coen Brothers, a couple of nice Jewish boys from the suburbs of Minneapolis (A Serious Man, their last film, was a paean to their upbringing), with a Christmas release of an Old Testament story of retribution. Returning to the source material, a novel by Charles Portis, and claiming not to have seen the John Wayne film, the Brothers Coen, kings of the violently grim/whimsical genre of their own devising, have done the story justice and made a damn fine film in the process.

Jeff Bridges continues to savor his grizzled character actor status, which must be a relief of sort after years of pretty boydom (back on digital display in the new Tron reboot). With no trace of The Dude in sight, Bridges plays Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn, one-eyed Marshall of ill-repute (and irritable bowels), who is nonetheless possessed of the kind of ruthless "true grit" that prompts the 14-year-old Mattie Ross (an astonishing Hailee Steinfeld) to make hire of him to track her father's killer, a ne'er-do-well by the name of Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Joining the hunting party into Indian country is LaBoeuf, a vainglorious Texas Ranger chasing Chaney on a prior crime. This time around, he's played by Matt Damon, who has considerable fun jangling his spurs, but brings some shaded nuance to LaBoeuf's insecurities. (The less said about the original LaBoeuf, played by Rhinestone Cowboy Glen Campbell, the better.)

Both Cogburn and LaBoeuf are hardened mercenaries who try to leave Mattie behind, despite her insistence of witnessing Mr. Chaney's justice. After she swims her horse across a river to catch up with them, they come to respect their fiercely determined patron, dressed in the oversized coat and hat of her dead father. Naturally Chaney has fallen into the bad company of the gang headed by Lucky Ned Pepper, a nemesis of Cogburn's (played with impressive snaggle-toothiness by Barry Pepper, no relation, I hope), which ups Cogburn's emotional stakes in the business at hand.

Long stretches where nothing much happens, reflective of the pace of travel on horseback, are punctuated by crackling dry dialog and moments of explosive violence (although, for a Coen Brothers movie, the violence is less shocking than usual, and the film is rated PG-13). The stunning cinematography is by Roger Deakins, who has shot most of the Coen's films and also The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and, oddly enough, Sid and Nancy (although think of that gorgeous, doomed-love shot of them kissing by an alley dumpster while trash floats down from the sky). The outdoors in this film is both beautiful and pitiless, especially when married into a scene of Cogburn racing through a night bursting with stars to get Mattie critical -- and far-off -- medical attention.

There is humor in True Grit, more so than in the Coens' recent modern-day Western, No Country for Old Men, but it is dry (and gritty), not the loosey-goosey stuff in Burn After Reading or O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Think of a less-verbose Deadwood, minus the "cocksuckers."

Hailee Steinfeld is truly amazing, so hat's off to the casting director who found her. Maybe I would have liked Westerns better if the original Mattie hadn't been played by a 21-year-old actress in a bob (Kim Darby), but instead by a fierce, grounded 14-year-old in braids.

And I'm somewhat amazed to remember two scenes from the original, which also appear in this film: Rooster riding at a full gallop, reins between his teeth to free up both his hands for shooting, and Rooster slicing open Mattie's snakebite and sucking the poison out of it. That struck me as an essential bit of survival skill to learn, even though I seldom encountered snakes in the wilds of suburban NJ.