True Grit

“True Grit’’ is much less a Charles Bronson thriller than it is a straightforward western. It’s spiced with the sort of comedy one expects from Joel and Ethan Coen and driven by the kind of earnestness one doesn’t. Their star is Bridges, playing a rambling, alcoholic US marshal named Reuben “Rooster’’ Cogburn. Their protagonist is Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a deadly serious 14-year-old from Yell County, Ark. She hires Cogburn to capture the man (Brolin) who killed her father, a farmer murdered on a business trip in 1880. The best way to build an ad campaign around this young woman, I suppose, is not to. But she’s the heart of the movie, and with her in their care, the Coens are on their best behavior.

This is somewhat disappointing news. One fellow loses some fingers and a few of the shootouts and one open-air duel are done with flair. But the movie seems chiefly transfixed by the excellence of its literary source material. Charles Portis’s novel was a bestseller in 1968. Its language was as pleasingly old-fashioned as the story was timelessly violent. On the page, Mattie was a force of natural ambition. She hires Cogburn to help her do her dirty work. The killer flees into Indian Territory (today known as Oklahoma) and needs his expertise in order to accomplish anything. This was more or less the gist of the film Portis’s book became the following year. The Hollywood veteran Henry Hathaway directed, and John Wayne, as Cogburn, amusingly lumbered his way through the movie and won himself an Oscar. If he wasn’t good or even consistent, he was intent.