True Grit

After an amazing three-film run that took them from Oscar glory (No Country for Old Men) to rare overt political comment (Burn After Reading) to sardonic self-critique (A Serious Man), the Coens mount their lightest genre pastiche in years with their remake of True Grit, a film whose veneer and pleasures are so old-fashioned you can picture watching it on a kinetoscope. Even Bridges, chewing twice as much cud as John Wayne did as Rooster Cogburn, aims for something halfway between grotesque and matinee ham; once your ear adjusts to his vocal inflections, every retort crackles. (“I do not know this man…” he sighs, after his companion laboriously cuts down a body hanged from a very high tree.)

It’s become conventional wisdom (and/or a cudgel) that whenever Steven Spielberg serves as executive producer on a project, he humanizes it, and it would appear so here: This is easily the Coens’ most innocent film, right down to its focus on a precocious lass who’s forced, after the cold-blooded murder of her father, to negotiate vengeance in an adult’s world. Casting is crucial; as newcomer Steinfeld argues horse pricing with a local, you feel as though you’re witnessing a star being born. There are too many sources and too many hands in the pot for Grit to feel like full-fledged Coeniana (though Roger Deakins’s burnished tones help), but the movie nevertheless shapes Charles Portis’s novel into an almost perfect balance between the saccharine and the tough. The brutality of a nighttime cabin interrogation offsets the sentimental finale (the snake-pit sequence is notably downplayed), while Coen-ready absurdity (a wandering dentist seems to have strayed in from Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man) and great supporting work (Pepper apparently turned into Harry Dean Stanton overnight) prevent the movie from drying out. It has not just grit but gravity.