Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a 14-year-old girl, is sent to town to collect the dead body of her father, Frank Ross. Frank was a good man who was double-crossed by a hired hand by the name of Tom Chaney. Chaney, deep in the drink, lost his money at cards and robbed and killed Frank Ross in the middle of town. A town, Mattie notes, where nobody knows the Ross family and where nobody will be too concerned with tracking down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Fortunately for Mattie, she’s one smart cookie, and she knows the only way to get things done is to find the right price. There’s no denying that True Grit has interesting characters, but they’re not what you’d call quirky. There’s the crude, good-hearted Rooster Cogburn, the sharp-as-a-tack 14-year-old Mattie, and the vain but skilled LaBoeuf. Jeff Bridges is simply wonderful as Rooster, a man who has seen a lot of terrible things and drinks too much as a result of his life, but who still strives to do good and be good in a cruel world. Damon does wonderful work as LaBoeuf, who is almost as good a tracker and lawman as he thinks he is. Barry Pepper has a great, brief supporting role as the noble outlaw Lucky Ned Pepper, and Josh Brolin is excellent as always as the dastardly Chaney. However, the real star of this film just might be Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross. She has a wonderful presence, a precocious nature borne not out of cuteness but out of life experience. As she says early in the film, her mother isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer and as the oldest child, she was the one who was at her father’s side for all the business of running the farm. This shows, both in the deft way she handles the affairs of her father at the auction house, and in the way she communicates with both her older traveling companions. The script, from the Coen Brothers based off of the original book by Charles Portis, is familiar, but impressive nonetheless. Rooster Cogburn’s tart tongue crackles like a whip, and Mattie Ross’s head for figures and business make her a formidable opponent. She may be young, but she’s not dumb. Much like the novel, True Grit‘s adaptation is a western that’s heavy on the laughs, but also not short on menage and action. LaBoeuf’s Texas-centric conversation is pretty apt, considering every Texan I’ve ever met is quick to remind everyone how great Texas is and how much worse everything is when you’re not in Texas. One of the stand-outs of this film is the cinematography. Roger Deakins is one of the best directors of photography working today, and it shows in his use of the landscape. The framing of these shots and the use of the natural envrionment as a shooting stage, including great use of hilltops, forests, and valleys, is very impressive throughout the film. This is a guy who really knows what he’s doing, which isn’t surprising given how beautiful No Country For Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford were. There’s a reason True Grit is coming out at the very end of the year, in the midst of Oscar season. The cast is top notch, Carter Burwell’s use of 19th century hymns for the soundtrack is a stroke of brilliance, and young Hailee Steinfeld’s performance is one of the best I’ve seen in an actress so young, second only to Natalie Portman in The Professional/Leon. True Grit is a brilliant western, and it’s less a remake than it is an entirely new story that just happens to contain Rooster Cogburn. While it’s not what you’d expect from the Coen Brothers, it’s a reminder yet again that they are more than just the funny black comedy guys. This is a real horse opera, not a Coen Brothers version of a western. Follow Den Of Geek on Twitter right here.
title: “True Grit Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-20” author: “Victor Anderson”
Most of all, they’re really good at making films in a specific period of time or context – the 30s setting of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, for example, or the late-40s mounting of The Man Who Wasn’t There. Or even the 90s embedding of The Big Lebowski, whose central character, The Dude, abided so perfectly in the reign of Bush, Sr. Hailee Steinfeld is startlingly assured as the eloquent, determined teenage girl out for revenge, and matches the heavyweight presence of Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin blow for blow in every scene in which she appears. In a Hollywood full of precocious, slick young actors, Steinfeld’s performance is natural and engaging, and she plays an intelligent character without the showy overconfidence of many of tinsel town’s newcomers. True Grit‘s plot couldn’t be more simple. Mattie (Steinfeld), intent on avenging her father’s death, cunningly presses both ageing, alcoholic mercenary Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) and strutting Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Damon) to help her catch felon Chaney (Josh Brolin) and bring him to account. On this scant, generic framework, the Coen brothers drape all kinds of wonderful exchanges, unforgettable scenes and moments of weirdness that only they could concoct. A sequence where an oddball character emerges from the winter gloom cloaked in a bear suit is unforgettably, arrestingly oblique. There’s a 21st century patina of honesty, too, in True Grit‘s depiction of its 19th century protagonists. Far from the rigidly good and evil distinctions we may have seen some (but by no means all) Westerns of the past, the lines here are constantly blurred, and it’s evident late on that the men Mattie’s hired aren’t much more virtuous than the outlaw she’s hunting. To cap it all, True Grit is a beautiful film from a visual and aural standpoint, too. Its cinematography, courtesy of Roger Deakins, is economical, yet sometimes stunning in its detail and beauty, from its opening sequence in a flurry of snow to its concluding shot. True Grit is a Hollywood movie that, for once, doesn’t feel compromised by executives out to entice the broadest demographic they can. Its dialogue, mumbled at breakneck speed in sometimes impenetrable southern accents, is difficult to understand at times, but this adds as much to the film’s authenticity as the moth-eaten clothes and rotten teeth. This is a triumph for the Coen brothers, then, and its solid box-office takings and numerous award nominations (including ten Oscars and eight BAFTAs) are entirely justified. True Grit premieres in UK cinemas today, February 11th.
