- Location: Century Boulder
- Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is a fat, old, one-eyed, ornery fellow who growls and mumbles what we assume are words. He's known as the meanest of the available U.S. Marshals, and one assumes that he also numbers amongst the most drunk and incoherent. When we first meet him, it's through the door of a commode. Our second encounter takes place in a courthouse, where Cogburn has been summoned to testify concerning his shooting of three men. The details of the trial don't quite add up, but there aren't any living witnesses left to call Cogburn a liar. When Cogburn decides to sleep, which may not be a nightly occurrence, he hunkers down in the back room of a Chinese grocery. In other words, not the typical cinematic Old West Lawman.
- But then again, Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) isn't looking for a typical lawman. Embittered by the murder of her father at the hands of the villainous Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), young Mattie has devoted her life to seeing that justice is served. But don't let her pigtails fool you. Headstrong and determined, Mattie will see that Chaney is caught and hanged and she will have Cogburn's help, regardless of the manner in which he will inevitably agree to provide it. As a rule, contradicting Mattie immediately invites the threat of her lawyer, and well, don't even attempt to trade ponies with her. Her perseverance is enough to overcome even Cogburn's laziness, and that's saying something.
- As dedicated as Mattie is to gaining Cogburn's help, she is equally disinclined to enlist the participation of the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). LaBoeuf is a naive and proud man whose interest in this affair is driven by his own dogged pursuit of Tom Chaney for the murder of a Texas senator. LeBoeuf is as sober and uptight as Cogburn is inebriated and disorganized, and they aren't long on the trail before the two start shooting cornbread to prove who's the better lawman. It is during one of LaBoeuf's many splits from the group, however, that Cogburn and Mattie happen upon a shack containing "a Methodist and a son-of-a-bitch" (Domhnall Gleeson and Paul Rae), both of whom are outlaws. That encounter doesn't go especially well, but at least they discover that Chaney is riding with "Lucky" Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper) and his gang. When LaBoeuf stumbles upon the shack at exactly the wrong time, however, things just go from bad to worse. With LaBeouf shot and Pepper escaped, it will be that much more difficult to track down Chaney. "That didn't pan out," grunts Cogburn.
- When Mattie finally does encounter Chaney, however, things don't go quite like she, or the audience, might have expected. Contrary to the stereotypical black-hatted, mustache-twirling villain, Chaney gives the distinct impression of being a moron. Like the vast majority of characters in this film (with the notable exception of Mattie), his complete lack of diction sends him stumbling through dialogue that sounds like it was memorized from a book, which in some sense it was. Unfortunately for Chaney, his dullness extends to making him slow on the draw, which leaves him shot in the ribs and very, very angry. This sounds like the perfect opportunity for Rooster Cogburn to prove who has "true grit" and, more importantly, to prove that he can cleanly utter the film's most famous lines, "Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch!"
- In the pantheon of Westerns, True Grit ranks somewhere in the middle, a quality it also shares with the original film. That said, the genre has been sufficiently lackluster of late that you'd have to go back twenty years to Unforgiven to find a much better Western and probably back to Sergio Leone or John Ford to find anything better than that. In my mind, however, the real accomplishment of True Grit is Jeff Bridges' performance as Rooster Cogburn. As a rule, one should not attempt to fill a role defined by John Wayne, but Bridges' late career resurgence continues to impress as he naturally transforms himself into a walking mass of liquor, rambling, and befuddlement. The Coen brothers' direction and Roger Deakins' cinematography, too, are uniformly good, even if they were much better in The Man Who Wasn't There and No Country for Old Men. Still, one must give the Coens credit, if only for having the audacity to insert such bizarre dialogue and a man in a bear suit into a remake of a John Wayne film.
- Based on, and possibly just a reading of, the novel by Charles Portis.
