It's not only that Mattie's revenge didn't accomplish anything, that it was for her merely another practical inconvenience to be bargained, paid for, and settled, like her father's ponies and saddle or the service of the US Marshall before, but that she clings to the memory of it so fiercely. The epilogue is important in that aspect. This is the marvellous touch effected by the Coens on the material the minute recreation of the Old West as a historical place and the odd, incongruous moments found within it annihilate any authority over the material. Perhaps we are even seeing the film as Mattie relives the experience in her old age, an affair shaped by memory and time. Although I wished for more open landscapes, it makes sense then that film narrows our gaze and clouds the margins. The Coen film unfolds as a hazy dream of that West. This becomes more apparent when Mattie falls in the snakepit, but what about the hanged men who are really hanged high? The Hathaway film, ostensibly based on the same material, missed that note and played out a straight western. In both cases a young girl is determined to plunge herself in a dark world of hurt and walk a path fraught with perils on all sides to achieve a moral purpose, both films maintain an appearance of realism, but what I get from them is a magical fantasy. Is this a traditional western then? Watching True Grit through the eyes of the brass 14yo girl reminded me of Winter's Bone, another film from the same year. Now we know there is stuff about the legends that don't make the print, or we are suspicious enough about legends to imagine them. Then we were beginning to realize that wars are not gloriously, justly won but survived and endured, now we know there is no clear struggle between dual opposites and have grown disenchanted as that knowledge has failed to prevent the same wars. We've been accustomed to heroes who are not heroes, and maybe the erosion of that heroic archetype says something about the way we view the world now, as opposed to 30-40 years ago. The dastardly revisit of something that was revisionist in the 70's oddly seems to give, in our day, a traditional western. In the remake, most comments seem to point out that it's a fairly traditional/entertaining western.

The casting mattered in our appreciation. When John Wayne played Cogburn in the Hathaway film the reward for the audience was the smirk of watching John Wayne be that drunken failure. Another interesting aspect here is how the concept of the gunslinger and the western with it has evolved. I like the courtroom scene where it's gradually revealed that he won't only bushwack those he needs to bring to justice, he will lie to make himself out to be the hero. Clint Eastwood also fell from a horse in Unforgiven and couldn't shoot a tin can to save his soul, but Munny 'was' a scumbag, Cogburn still is and I like that. This probably won't do it for Jeff Bridges because we've been accustomed to expect a certain degree of po-faced seriousness from a great performance (he snarled and staggered in Crazy Heart but he was serious about it), but he's one of the great actors of our times and I find this again in his Rooster Cogburn. As with No Country, I came to this film looking to see is there a statement on violence, does it happen in a certain way and is the universe indifferent to it, is life worth a damn? This one here works very much like the Henry Hathaway film from '69, except everyone's better, where John Wayne played a character, Jeff Bridges plays a man, and even Barry Pepper betters my beloved Robert Duvall's turn as Ned Pepper. A Coen film works for me in the face of it, but I'm always on the lookout for what goes on behind, for the unseen cogs that grind out the fates of their characters.

Try to take out the Coen character from the film and the film breaks apart, it's that tightly woven in the fabric of it. True Grit is a commercial film made to please but I don't see a compromise in the making and it's still a distinctly Coen film if you pay notice. Few directors working today in America have mastered form like the Coens, I discover this with every new film they make.

Cast of true grit 2010