In True Grit, the latest film from Ethan and Joel Coen, 14-year-old protagonist Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is determined to see justice brought to the man (Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney) who killed (and robbed) her father. Leaving her home, she goes into town — what there is of it — to take care of burial arrangements (a booming business, the opening scenes’ hangings suggest) but stays to run a few errands of her own. First, arguing a settlement out of the man who was boarding her family’s horses, which were stolen. Then, with the money, hiring someone to help her track down the killer, in the form of Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), who, when she first casts eyes on him, is on trial for shooting nearly every single male member of a local family for no particular reason. But this pigtailed, puritanical young lady wants the most heartless marshal around. Or at least, as she tells him, someone with “true grit.”
Their plan, complicated by Rooster’s preference to work alone (or at least without a teen hanging around) and the appearance of a showy Texas Ranger named LaBouef (Matt Damon), was to track Chaney into Indian territory, which, eventually, they do. But the film’s parsimonious with its emotions and the Coen Brothers do little to make us care about Mattie’s quest or the characters that help and hinder her. What’s more important to know, and what you’ll probably remember long after this adaptation of the 1968 Western novel by Charles Portis ends, is that Mattie speaks without contractions and still near too darn quickly to keep up with, or that Rooster impossibly manages to growl and whine simultaneously, or how LaBouef sounds when moralizing with only half a bleeding tongue. It’s language, not revenge, that compels here. The latter may be the archetypal West’s religion, but it’s the chacters’ antiquated turns of phrase that the film seems to worship.
While the dialogue spirals into intricate sentences (sometimes lifted whole from the book) that often reach great comedic heights on their own (propelled by great delivery from the entire cast) , there’s also an inherent comedy in the contrast between the elevated verbiage and the dust and blood that covers everything else. The Coen Brothers’ previous film to mine the old American tongue, 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, occupied a physical world just as fantastic and pliable as its characters’ words, but in True Grit the standard rules of physics and human folly seem to apply (the Coens pay exacting attention to the landscape’s geography, for instance, and how their characters travel through it). There’s no physical humor to be found among this film’s hangings, splattered brains, dying horses, and buzzards; its wordy laughs stick out like the Tower of Babel doing standup in the purgatory of 1870s Arkansas. When a fat traveling dentist dressed in a bear hide and a lot of grime runs into Rooster and Mattie in Choctaw country, we laugh at his molasses-slow formal diction. Then he offers to sell them a putrid green corpse, for the useful parts.
Like determined little Mattie’s weird partnership with the often-drunk Rooster and the righteous and also probably pederast LaBouef (who experiences some sadistic sexual tension with Mattie), the film’s uneasy alliance of moods is both intensified and held together by the Coen Brothers’ decision to otherwise play it straight aesthetically. Adult-contemporary orchestral arrangements of old American hymns unironically play during pointless hangings, and Roger Deakins’ pretty cinematography makes us think we’re watching a normal Western in the film’s few moments of silence.
This almost makes it feel like their slickest film yet. Instead, it might be their slipperiest, making it all the more painful when the film trips, which it does several times, violating its own rigid, yet idiosyncratic, internal logic. In one scene, Mattie rides her pony across a river to join LaBouef and Rooster on the other bank; despite being flared-nostril-deep in water, seconds after her crossing, when LaBouef throws her down for a spanking that’s more for his own good than hers, both she and her horse are inexplicably dry. In another mistake, Rooster claims the pony he’s desperately set out on won’t make the long journey he has ahead of him, only to seconds later pass by (and glance at) the perfectly good horses of some men he’d just shot. There’s also a laughable incident with snakes near the conflict’s apogee.
Which, by the way, gets resolved, more or less. The film’s told as a flashback; for a few seconds at its start, a grown Mattie narrates through voiceover, but we never hear from her again until the film’s end, when she appears onscreen, several feet taller and much older than the Mattie we’d grown accustomed to. But while True Grit goes through all the motions of wrapping things up efficiently and precisely, it doesn’t offer much satisfaction. The only closure, I guess, is meaninglessness, with a few jokes in between.