The Coens make a drier, dirtier version of the story

"True grit" is the quality 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) has heard is possessed by one-eyed US Marshall Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), and she hires him to go after Tom Cheney (Josh Brolin), the man who has shot and killed her father. But compared to Bridges' seedy, alcoholic marauder, "true grit" seems in a more pristine state in young Mattie herself. Only she can't go and get the killer by herself. She gets help, and some trouble, from both Rooster and the Texas Ranger LaBoef (Matt Damon). This is vintage, if not prime, Coen brothers. It's a good and flavorful remake of the 1969 John Wayne film that goes back and gets closer to the formal, contraction-free lingo and slightly satirical tone of the original Charles Portis novel.

Bridges, Damon, Brolin, and the others deliver flavorful performances. But the movie belongs to newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, whose Mattie has a quicker wit and a sterner tongue than anybody else. Steinfeld is a splendidly self-possessed and articulate young actress. She is the reason for seeing True Grit. This is a good adaptation, one in which the Coens are having fun but not ripping up their source. It is far from having the power of their 2007 filming of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which made a great movie. We already knew True Grit made a good movie; this version isn't so much better, just grittier and drier. The Coen brothers are amazingly consistent performers, distinctive auteurs who write as well as they direct, but judging by the high marks, the critics are giving them perhaps just a little bit too much of a free ride this time. Why weren't they -- or I should say why were they not --this enthusiastic about the far more original A Serious Man? Because they didn't get it. This is easier to get, but it offers lesser rewards. In its violence and drollery and its viewpoint of a precocious girl it is more clearly than the 1968 movie something other than a Western, but it lacks the razzle-dazzle and the literary originality of No Country for Old Men. It has moments of wit, terror, and violence, but it doesn't have suspense or profound meaning.

Or course John Wayne got an Oscar for his performance, or as some would say, for the accomplishment of playing John Wayne while getting a little dirty and falling off a horse. The 1969 Mattie tells Rooster "If I smelled as bad as you do I wouldn't live near people." No such comment needed now. When you look at Bridges' Rooster waking from a night in the saloon, you want to hold your nose. The Coens have upped the flavor, and the stench, and the shock of violence: one or two gunshots make you jump out of your seat. The more ornate language gives the impression people are thinking hard. The story is all about bargaining, particularly Mattie's to get her father's money back and to manipulate Cogburn and LaBoef. LaBoef wants the rogue Cheney for a Texas crime, which offers him a better reward. Cogburn and LaBoef are continually sizing up what Cheney is worth to them and whether the girl is a worthwhile proposition. The girl is continually resizing her estimate of the two men. Cogburn doesn't seem much of a prospect when he gets so drunk on the road that he falls off his horse.

Much of this is the same in both movies. This is not a radical reimgaining of the book, rather it follows it closely. Though some speak of this book in the same breath with Huckleberry Finn or Little Big Man, it is less impressive than that, not the radical version of the West you find in E. L. Doctorow's brilliant, terrifying Welcome to Hard Times, another Sixties book made into a western (in 1967, with Henry Fonda and Warren Oates) that might be ripe for a bolder remake. The Coens' version of Portis' book is far less sanitized, but with its handsome Roger Deakins cinematography, it is still standard movie fare in acting and visuals. What recommends this recension, besides Hailee Steinfeld (who is not enough emphasized in the credits or posters, especially considering this story is told from her point of view), is the way the cast are encouraged to mouth the lines with all their formalities intact. It's the way they put some English on Portis' mimicry of stilted 19th-century sentences that the Coens have the most fun here. At its best moments this True Grit shows how shootouts and haggling are different levels of the same thing, the American West's recycling of greed into bravery and profit.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.