True Grit Review

The Coens play this one straight, which turns out to be the boldest choice available to them. Their adaptation goes back to Charles Portis for its language, so everyone speaks in unabbreviated nineteenth-century formal English, no contractions anywhere, a rhythm specific enough to become its own kind of music. Hailee Steinfeld, fourteen at the time, delivers that dialogue like a lawyer collecting a debt, and her Mattie Ross drives the picture rather than decorating it.

Jeff Bridges mumbles Rooster Cogburn out of the side of a ruined mouth and refuses to soften him anywhere. Matt Damon gives the funniest performance as a Texas Ranger whose self-regard survives every humiliation the plot invents. Roger Deakins shoots winter scrub and bare trees in a low sun that leaves the territory genuinely unmapped, and the night ride near the end, stars overhead and a horse running itself to death, is the most purely beautiful stretch of filmmaking these two have managed.

The epilogue then charges the cost the manhunt had been deferring. It is faithful, funny and unexpectedly mournful, and it never nudges you about how clever it is being.