REVIEW: The Coen Brothers Pull Off an Almost-Great True Grit

There's a third figure in this ragtag little search party, a Texas ranger with a puffy ego and a ridiculously oversized set of spurs named Mr. LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who immediately gets on Mattie's bad side by patronizing her. (When she sasses him back, he feebly tries to put her back in her place -- "A saucy manner does not go down with me" -- but you can tell he's already sunk.)

The Coens are expert craftsmen, but too often they temper their dark view of human nature with a knowing smirk. With True Grit, they downplay that impulse and instead hew closely to the delicately whittled textures of Portis' book. It, and the movie the Coens have made, is alternately somber, funny, elegiac and steadfastly if unconventionally moral. And with the help of their trusty sidekick Deakins, the Coens use the landscape beautifully, capturing the majesty of ripply baptismal rivers and craggy, charred-bone trees alike.

The language, visual and otherwise, is pitch-perfect Portis, and the actors thrive in this environment. Damon, who has the uncanny ability to be appealing in even the stupidest movies (Exhibit A: Hereafter), makes a great LaBoeuf, a show-off whose windbaggery can barely hide his shyness, or his true decency. Damon treats the hardwood formality of the language as if it were beat poetry, playing it straight and crooked at once, and it works like gangbusters.

And Steinfeld -- her eyebrows two stern, judgmental hyphens -- plays Mattie without undue exaggeration or meekness. Her spirit is just right, and you see that in one of the movie's early scenes, in which she bargains with a wheeler-dealer stable owner (played by Dakin Matthews), wearing him down until he agrees to buy back the ponies he'd recently sold her deceased father. You're likely to be dizzied by Mattie's math, but there's no doubt she comes out the winner in the deal: Steinfeld keys in to Mattie's unwavering, otherworldly confidence, never mistaking it for cockiness.

Bridges, despite the the fact that he's perfectly suited to this material (and that he's generally awesome, period), may give the weakest performance of the three -- which isn't to say he's bad. True Grit was previously adapted by Henry Hathaway in 1969, with John Wayne, Kim Darby and Glenn Campbell, and although that version misfires in capturing the tone of the book, and has the stiff, glossy feel of late-era westerns (that's why The Wild Bunch had to happen), it also has a great deal of charm. That's largely thanks to Wayne. Sixtyish at the time, Wayne, with his rounded belly and analytical squint, was hardly pretending to have a young man's bravado. But it's still John Wayne in those longjohns, and the calloused dignity he brings to the role -- as well as the way he so tenderly maps out his affection for and frustration with Darby's Mattie -- is something to watch.

Bridges, wisely, seems to have no interest in filling Wayne's boots; instead, his performance walks alongside and maybe a little behind Wayne's, in a "just a closer walk with thee" kind of way. In places he's impishly cartoonish. After trying, ineptly, to prove to LaBoeuf that he's still a crackerjack marksman, he leaps into the air, cackling, his coat-tails flaring out around him, a dead-ringer for Yosemite Sam. His lines come out like slurry cannonballs -- it's as if his mouth is stuffed with cotton (maybe it is).

The performance is fun, but it's neither as effortlessy weighty or as moving as Wayne's. But the Coens make up for that, inadvertently, with other touches of magic: At one point a character on horseback mysteriously emerges from the brush (to explain how he's dressed would give too much away) and introduces himself, with much gravitas, as Forrester, who practices "dentistry, veterinary arts and medicine on those humans who will sit still for it." And the movie's loveliest moment -- as well as its most harrowing -- is a horseback ride that begins at sunset and ends just as the stars are about to give up twinkling for the night. The sequence has the beauty, and the chilly mournfulness, of the moonlight boat ride in Night of the Hunter. That's what the Coens are capable of, at their best. You need a great Rooster to make a great True Grit. The Coens' makings, maybe, were just a little too dry. But the thing still smokes.

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