Barry Pepper plays Lucky Ned Pepper, leader of a gang Chaney ends up with, and part of the four-man charge across the meadow into Rooster's gunfire, a charge as lucky for them as the Charge of the Light Brigade. In the Western genre, evil can be less nuanced than in your modern movies with all their psychological insights.
Nor, we discover, is LaBoeuf a man of simple loyalty.Īs Tom Chaney, Brolin is a complete and unadulterated villain, a rattlesnake who would as soon shoot Mattie as Rooster. He and Cogburn have long-standing issues. Glen Campbell had the role earlier, and was right for the tone of that film. Damon is LaBoeuf, the Texas Ranger who comes along for a time to track Tom Chaney. Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper have weight and resonance in supporting roles. But the way she plays it with the Coens, she's more the kind of person you'd want guarding your back. Seeing this one, few people would get a crush on Hailee Steinfeld. Seeing the first “True Grit,” I got a little crush on Kim Darby. Mattie doesn't live in an adorable world. She sidesteps the opportunity to make Mattie adorable. This is Steinfeld's first considerable role. This is her story, set in motion by her, narrated by her.
Since then, that clean-faced young man has lived and rowdied and worked his way into being able to play Rooster with a savory nastiness that Wayne could not have equaled.Īll the same, the star of this show is Hailee Steinfeld, and that's appropriate.
#TRUE GRIT CAST MOVIE#
The Coens having demonstrated their mastery of many notes, including many not heard before, now show they can play in tune.īesides, isn't Rooster Cogburn where Jeff Bridges started out 40 years ago? The first time I was aware of him was in “ The Last Picture Show” (1971), where he and his friends went the local movie theater to see “ Red River,” starring John Wayne. So let me praise it for what it is, a splendid Western. This is like Iggy Pop singing “My Funny Valentine,” which he does very well. It's as if these two men, who have devised some of the most original films of our time, reached a point where they decided to coast on the sheer pleasure of good old straightforward artistry. It's not eccentric, quirky, wry or flaky. The cinematography by Roger Deakins reminds us of the glory that was, and can still be, the Western.īut this isn't a Coen Brothers film in the sense that we usually use those words. Their casting is always inspired and exact. That's a surprise to me, because this is a film by the Coen Brothers, and this is the first straight genre exercise in their career. What strikes me is that I'm describing the story and the film as if it were simply, if admirably, a good Western. The story hinges on the steely resolve of a girl who has been raised in the eye-for-an eye Old West, seen some bad sights and picked up her values from the kind of old man who can go and get hisself shot. Steinfeld was 13 when she made the film, close to the right age. She means to kill him for “what he done.” If Bridges comfortably wears the Duke's shoes, Hailee Steinfeld is more effective than Kim Darby in the earlier film, and she was pretty darn good. She hires Marshal Cogburn to track down that villain Tom Chaney ( Josh Brolin).
Of course he's a lawman with an office and a room somewhere in town, but for much of the movie, he is on a quest through inauspicious territory to find the man who murdered Mattie's father.Īs told in the novel, Mattie is a plucky young teen with a gaze as level as her hat brim. How savory can a man be when he lives in saloons and on horseback? Not all riders on the range carried a change of clothes. I found myself wondering how young Mattie Ross ( Hailee Steinfeld) could endure his body odor.īridges' interpretation is no doubt closer to the reality of a lawman in those years of the West. Jeff Bridges occupies the character like a homeless squatter. Rooster might be an ornery gunslinger with an eye patch, but Wayne played him wearing a hairpiece and a corset. He was a handsome, weathered man when I met him in the 1960s and '70s, but not above a certain understandable vanity. Wayne wanted his tombstone to read, Feo, Fuerte y Formal (Ugly, Strong and Dignified).
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