Yet again Wearing Braids, Seeking Revenge

A deputy United States marshal, Rooster has attracted the interest of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld, in a terrific film debut), a half-pint who, with her bloodlust and severely braided hair, is an authentic American Gothic . As she listens to Rooster recount his bloody deeds and high body count, her eyes shine with a true believer’s excitement. That 1969 film, a clunky, sentimental victory lap for John Wayne, was also a last gasp from an old Hollywood system quickly giving way to the industry’s young Turks. She then hires Rooster because she hears that he has “true grit,” a quality that mostly seems to entail a disregard for preserving the lives of his prisoners. That bleak but completely delightful Portis novel, in which a much older Mattie remembers the frontier West of the 1870s, has been charming and disconcerting people since it was published in 1968. The key reason is the vim and vigor of Mattie’s irrepressible narrative voice, which more than one critic has compared favorably to Huck Finn’s. It’s an old-time Western for the 21st century. If there’s one big difference between this version and the old, it’s in the attitude toward violence. Director of photography-lighting wizard Roger Deakins conjures a series of stunning Western tableaux, including an opening shot that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Filmed in the sere sepia tones befitting the 19th-century West, “True Grit” has the look, feel and sound of that era, its characters speaking in the courtly, declamatory style that can first strike the ear as mannered but soon takes on the cadence of folk poetry. What a far cry from the ’69 version, with director Henry Hathaway blasting triumphant Western music every time Wayne was about to kill somebody. Jeff Bridges – whose previous collaboration with the Coens produced cinema’s iconic stoner, Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski – plays Cogburn with eyepatch and baggy long johns, and with a gruff, grizzled conviction. Hathaway’s vision suggested that all this bloodletting was merely a symptom of a great nation’s growing pains, and to him these violent men, villains and heroes, were part of some bigger-than-life mosaic. The Coens, not known for softening anything, have restored the original’s bleak, elegiac conclusion and as writer-directors have come up with a version that shares events with the first film but is much closer in tone to the book — think of the original crossed with Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven.” Clearly recognizing a kindred spirit in Portis, sharing his love for eccentric characters and odd language, they worked hard, and successfully, at serving the buoyant novel as well as being true to their own black comic brio.

The Coens are crafty, and they know they’re dealing with a tale that crosses over from their usual art-house audience to a more family-friendly crowd. This is no country for young women but the kid holds her own, whether she’s shooting a rifle or threatening everyone with her Arkansas lawyer. Of course, if Rooster were to kill the guy outright, she wouldn’t really mind that, either. In many ways, Mattie is the spiritual great-great-grandmother of Marge Gunderson, who played the same kind of ethical center in the Coens’ 1999 masterpiece, “Fargo.” Like that film, “True Grit” evinces none of the snarky ironic distance that can sometimes mark and mar a Coen brothers production. Wearing jangling spurs and a luxurious mustache that sits on his lip like a spoiled Persian cat, LaBoeuf hopes to bag Chaney for a large reward. Dead or alive, everyone in this story — snaggletooth thief or boardinghouse owner — has a price either on his head or in mind, usually in the form of the dollars and cents one person hopes to extract from another. “Why do you think I am paying you,” Mattie asks Rooster, “if not to have my way?”

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