Marshal law

Watching drunken, one-eyed Jeff Bridges shooting pieces of shortbread out of the air with his six-gun may not sound like an Oscar clip, but it’s definitely one of the funniest scenes in True Grit, the Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1969 western. 

Bridges — playing patch-wearing US Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, slouching in the saddle as he totes confiscated bottles of whiskey along the trail — does not exactly banish all thoughts of The Dude; nor does he merely channel The Duke — John Wayne — who won an Oscar playing Cogburn in the original adaptation of the Charles Portis novel. Wayne’s was a blustery performance. Bridges’ performance, in contrast, sneaks up on you, until you find yourself looking beyond the gruff, slurred voice and the slumped posture to find a real character there. Of course, he did something similar in last year’s Crazy Heart (for which he bagged an Oscar) and in a dozen or so movies over the years. But he’s definitely hitting pay dirt these days.

Marshal Cogburn is hired by a 14-year-old girl named Mattie Ross (the amazing, half-Filipino Oscar nominee Hailee Steinfeld), and she is a force to be reckoned with. After her ranch hand father is shot dead by bushwhacker Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), she vows to track down the killer and bring him to justice. Seeing her take on a local businessman, eventually extracting $320 from him in a relentless bit of horse-trading, or watching her interview the local sheriff to determine who among the local marshals is the most “merciless,” you can tell Mattie Ross is one tough kid. She doesn’t bat an eyelash, even when having to bunk down with a bunch of corpses in the local mortuary. You kind of have to be tough out on the frontier, and that’s what the Coen brothers celebrate in this, their first true western. (That’s right, I don’t really count No Country For Old Men, which takes place in modern times. And though many of their twisted tales occur in Texas, none was set in the Old West before.)

Joel and Ethan Coens’ screenplay adaptation of the Portis novel is remarkable, almost a textbook lesson in developing character, preserving humor and unfolding story. And the old story still works, thanks to frequent injections of humor and frontier patois. Here, as in earlier Coen films like Miller’s Crossing, you have to tune your ears carefully to catch all the period dialect (mostly drawn straight from the book). But game viewers will be pleasantly rewarded.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it: Matt Damon plays Texas Ranger LaBoeuf goofy, but “ever stalwart” in True Grit.

Cogburn is reluctant to track down Chaney — even with the offer of $100 — and is even more reluctant when Mattie insists on coming along. (She is constantly threatening to haul somebody to court for “fraud” if they do not honor an agreement, insisting she has “a very good lawyer.” Who knew the Old West was so litigious?) Added to this odd couple is Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), an outsized figure who could easily have been played for laughs, with his sideburns, his spurs a-jingling and jangling and his pipe always lit; but Damon brings out more than just goofiness in his character, and you end up seeing this trio as one hell of a team.

The original novel is told from Mattie’s perspective, and it’s almost a coming-of-age adolescent novel. But there are no teenage vampires out there on the range, just lots of dangerous thieves and killers, snakes, and the occasional Choctaw out for a scalp. Cogburn, Mattie and LaBoeuf encounter quite a few of these, and it becomes clear that Cogburn does not regard himself as quite the legend that all his bluster might suggest. Yes, he has shot some 23 men in the course of his duties, but only in “defending himself,” as he tells a court of law early in the film. Yet as the movie progresses, we tend to doubt his less-than-sterling character, as he does himself. Rooster is old, half-broken-down, half-blind, prone to drunkenness and boasting; he alludes to having robbed banks and done time before becoming a marshal.

It’s Mattie who drags the best out of him. With her oversized coat, man’s hat and tight pigtails, it’s her steely determination to bring her dad’s killer to “justice” that drives their every move.

Steinfeld, the half-Filipino who plays Mattie, was chosen out of 15,000 audition applicants. “We were aware if the kid doesn’t work, there’s no movie,” Ethan Coen told the New York Times. Fourteen-year-old Steinfeld definitely nails it, bringing not only the bratty determination of a tweener, but the quick wit of a future lawyer to the table.

We see Mattie’s loyalty shift between the unstable Cogburn, with his ruthless reputation and quick gun, and the flashier, more petulant LaBoeuf, who keeps quitting the search expedition due to Cogburn’s sloppy ways. It’s an interesting battle for the soul of a young girl, but in the end, the scene that is most remarkable and which will stay with viewers, perhaps, takes place one starry night, across a luminous plain that is just starting to experience the first flakes of winter snow: Cogburn has the snake-bit Mattie strapped to the back of their surviving horse, a pony Mattie has dubbed “Little Blackie.” She’s feverish and whimpering; he’s urging the horse along with his crop into the darkness, way beyond the pony’s strength and endurance, toward a doctor, or any kind of well-lit abode. Cogburn is shot himself, but keeps riding, knowing the pony will not last much longer. When it collapses, and the marshal shoots it dead to stop its pain, Mattie cries out in poisoned delirium, and for those few moments, you are reminded that, despite all her toughness and resolve, she’s really just a young girl. He picks her up and carries her the rest of the way, all the way to a frontier homestead and the promise of rest and care. It’s the kind of unabashedly poetic, emotional moment that once drove old-fashioned westerns like Old Yeller or Shane, but it’s amazing to see that it still works so well, so movingly, in the hands of the Coens. Movie magic lives.