True Grit (2010)

A stubborn teenager enlists the help of a tough U.S. Marshal to track down her father's murderer.

Directors:

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

Writers:

Joel Coen (screenplay), Ethan Coen (screenplay)

Stars:

Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Hailee Steinfeld

Nominated for 10 Oscars. Another 37 wins & 159 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Jeff Bridges	...	Rooster Cogburn
Hailee Steinfeld	...	Mattie Ross
Matt Damon	...	LaBoeuf
Josh Brolin	...	Tom Chaney
Barry Pepper	...	Lucky Ned Pepper
Dakin Matthews	...	Col. Stonehill
Jarlath Conroy	...	Undertaker
Paul Rae	...	Emmett Quincy
Domhnall Gleeson	...	Moon (The Kid)
Elizabeth Marvel	...	40-Year-Old Mattie
Roy Lee Jones	...	Yarnell
Ed Corbin	...	Bear Man (as Ed Lee Corbin)
Leon Russom	...	Sheriff
Bruce Green	...	Harold Parmalee
Candyce Hinkle	...	Boarding House Landlady

Storyline

Following the murder of her father by hired hand Tom Chaney, 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross sets out to capture the killer. To aid her, she hires the toughest U.S. marshal she can find, a man with "true grit," Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn. Mattie insists on accompanying Cogburn, whose drinking, sloth, and generally reprobate character do not augment her faith in him. Against his wishes, she joins him in his trek into the Indian Nations in search of Chaney. They are joined by Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who wants Chaney for his own purposes. The unlikely trio find danger and surprises on the journey, and each has his or her "grit" tested.

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Plot Keywords:

revisionist western | reference to new mexico | spanking threat | public hanging | execution by hanging | 

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Taglines:

Punishment comes one way or another

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Genres:

Drama | Western

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for some intense sequences of western violence including disturbing images

Details

Official Sites:

Official Facebook Official site [France]

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

22 December 2010 (USA)

Also Known As:

True Grit

Filming Locations:

Jamaica

Box Office

Budget:

$38,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$24,830,443, 26 December 2010

Gross USA:

$171,243,005

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$252,276,927

Company Credits

Production Co:

Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Scott Rudin Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

110 min

Sound Mix:

SDDS DTS Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Although Cogburn refers to his "Navy Sixes," there is never an appearance of a Colt 1851 Navy revolver in the movie. The 2 pistols Cogburn carries in his saddle holsters, holds in the cornbread scene, and fires in the charge scene, are 2nd model Colt Dragoon revolvers according to Keith Walters the movie's property master. Cogburn's mention of "Navy Sixes" was part of his account charging and scattering a posse following him after a bank robbery years ago and before he was a US Marshal. It's possible that he has swapped the Colt 1851 Navy revolvers for Dragoons.

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Goofs

True Grit is set in 1873. Issac Parker was appointed judge in the US District Court for Arkansas' Western District in 1875.

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Quotes

[first lines]
40-Year-Old Mattie: People do not give it credence that a young girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood. But it did happen. I was just 14 years of age when a coward by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down and robbed him of his life and his horse and two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Chaney was a hired man and Papa had taken him up to Fort Smith to help lead back a string of Mustang ponies he'd bought. In town, Chaney had ...

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Crazy Credits

Buster Coen, Ethan Coen's son, is listed in the end credits as "Mr. Damon's abs double". In reality, he was an on-set assistant to the script supervisor.

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Connections

Referenced in The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: Episode #19.63 (2011)

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Soundtracks

Greer County Bachelor
19th Century American folksong
Sung by Jeff Bridges

User Reviews

Get the comparisons out of the way, then give the film its due.

Let's get the comparisons with Henry Hathaway's version of the Charles Portis novel out of the way. The Coen Brothers certainly knew that, however much they want to 'go back to the source material,' their film would play against Hathaway's version.

The Hathaway version, while tampering with details from the Portis original, remains strikingly true to its story and theme. This is most clear in the dialog - the decision not to tamper with Portis' language was decisive for the making of that film. The Coens' tampering with the novel is more subtle than Hathaway's film, but no less an interpretation.

Approaching the characters and composition of the Coens' version without reference to the Hathaway film apparently proved impossible. For instance, the shoot-out at the dug-out cabin was re-written for a night-scene, but the camera angles remain pretty much the high-elevation shots Lucien Ballard provided Hathaway, inter-cut with full body shots of people getting wounded and horses running (etc.)also similar to Ballard's.

Two performance stand out as striking examples of reference to the original film. Dakin Matthews seems to struggle mightily not to recreate Strother Martin's interpretation of the horse-trader Stonehill - and fails. Apparently Martin had the character down pat and there's nothing but to reproduce his interpretation. Far more to the point is Barry Pepper's interpretation of the desperate outlaw chief, Ned Pepper - it is pure Robert Duvall. Pepper can only match Duvall's self-aware determination - and he does - but he can't surpass it; nor can he find another interpretation to set off against Duvall's.

As for the Coens' own re-interpretation of the Portis novel, what was most noticeable to me were the minor points simply dropped out of the story telling. The most irritating to me were a pair of lapses that are interconnected and combine to make an important point about the characters. 1. We never get to see Mattie tell Rooster that Chaney has linked up with Ned Pepper (later Rooster does remark the fact, but how did he learn of it?); 2 We don't get to hear Rooster's remarking how he shot Pepper through the upper lip (because he was aiming at the lower lip). These two incidents combine to let the audience know that Cogburn's hidden agenda on the Chaney hunt is really Ned Pepper, he and Pepper have something of a feud going on - which information fills out the background detail for their final shoot-out. Except here we don't have that connection.

Finally, the whole Mattie - Rooster issue: many critics are saying that Mattie is more at the center here than in the Hathaway picture, which focused attention on John Wayne's Cogburn. Not true. When we add up screen time and lines of dialog, we discover that Mattie not only has as much time and dialog in the Hathaway film but it is in much the same proportion to Cogburn's as in this one. If most remember the Hathaway film as a 'John Wayne film,' that is due simply to Wayne's bravura performance.

Well, enough of the comparisons. Does the Coens' version measure up as film worth seeing on its own accord? Yes; we are presented here with a beautiful, frightening, amusing piece of 'Americana.' There are scenes approaching dream-like states, as in the meeting with the bear-man, and during Rooster's desperate drive to get Mattie to a doctor. Hailee Steinfeld is quite engaging, and Matt Damon develops an intriguing complexity that makes one wish he had more screen-time. Bridges' performance is the most problematic - Bridges plays Cogburn as a a kind of whimsical brute - as he rambles on with his life-story on the trail, we get the gnawing sense that, if we were not along for a dangerous manhunt and dependent on his abilities as a master man-hunter, Cogburn would be someone we would not like to know. This develops a distance between the audience and Cogburn that is actually rather on par for the Coens - there are no 'heros' in the Coen universe.

Perhaps that's a good thing here. Mattie in her experiences with the wild men of the old west has encountered something larger than her life on the farm could ever get her. These are men who make their own laws and are not bound to statutory codes or biblical decrees, and adapt their own law to the wilds of the frontier that surrounds them. Mattie is a confirmed church-goer with a good lawyer, and if she weren't so determined on her revenge, she would actually be impossibly small-minded and dull. This is a subtext to the novel that both films attempt to convey, but neither quite captures, because it's difficult for any film maker to admit that the central character of the story is the least interesting.

The age of such wild-men has passed. It is not that wild-men do not exist - wild-men show up quite frequently in Coen Brothers' films in contemporary settings - but now they are corrupted by moving outside the law and outside the commonplace, they grow sick and psychopathic. The killer in "Fargo" feeding the partner he's killed to a wood-chipper is as wild as one could get, but he is no longer larger than life, and evokes only the sickness at the heart of modernity, not any adaptation one would want to live with.

We look back at historical moments like those of the Old West because anything seemed possible to them, whereas very little is possible for us. But that might simply be a wishful delusion - and the Coens' clear suspicion that it is really determines the limits of what they accomplish here. They don't present the West as 'it really was,' nor do they present what we want from it, rather they present a disappointment with it. Rooster Cogburn is indeed 'larger than life,' but we wouldn't want to spend any more time with him than we do.