TRUE GRIT (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Joel and Ethan Coen
Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Hailee Steinfeld,
Josh Brolin, Barry Pepper, Dakin Matthews
Jeff Bridges takes on the eye patch and the old John Wayne role in the Coen Brothers remake of the Duke's Oscar-winning vehicle from 1969. The story, from the Charles Portis novel, has a 14-year-old girl named Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) recruiting a crusty old federal marshall named Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) to help her track down the outlaw who killed her father. Intermittently joining them is a cocky, loquacious Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). In a lot of ways, this movie improves on the original. Bridges, who's about the same age Wayne was in the previous "True Grit", doesn't try to play John Wayne. But with a maximum of orneriness and a minimum of sentiment, he's a great Rooster Cogburn, a guy who probably eats nails for breakfast and shits bullets in the afternoon. Damon takes over the role played earlier by Glen Campbell, and if that's not an improvement over the original, nothing is. Steinfeld has a straightforward freshness about her that makes Mattie's self-righteous disposition bearable, and she does a more than decent job with a wagonload of contractionless dialogue. Carter Burwell's score riffs on old hymns, and Roger Deakins' cinematography looks wonderful, the washed-out colors evoking another age. Much of the script and even some of the camera setups mirror the older movie, but the Coens (naturally) do a better job of tapping the story's potential for morbid comedy. There are still good reasons to watch the Duke's "True Grit", Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper and Strother Martin among them. But the Coens and Bridges have made their point. You don't want to miss this one, either.
