Joel & Ethan Coen
Il Grinta

The fourth work in four years, True Grit represents a new challenge for the Coen brothers: bringing back to the screen the story by Charles Portis already filmed 40 years earlier by Henry Hathaway with John Wayne in the role of the protagonist. It wasn’t just any movie for the Duke, but the only one for which he was awarded an Oscar as Best Actor. This can show how delicate the operation was, and the risk of "lese-majesty" high, but the nomination for 11 Oscars (without winning even one) and the greatest box office success of the two filmmakers' careers make it clear how both critics and audiences appreciated the adaptation.

For the first time, after several approaches, Joel and Ethan tackle a "classic" western, made of boundless spaces, long tracking shots, and shootouts, but at the same time, the film is not a mere remake, diverging in many points from the original film, with the intention of returning to the original atmospheres of the novel. The "grit" of the title refers to the undisputed protagonist Mattie Ross (the debuting and genuinely fourteen-year-old Hailee Steinfeld), through whom we see for the first time the Coen brothers highlighting this age group in their film.

Little Mattie is seeking revenge: an outlaw, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) has killed her father, and to obtain justice, she hires a bounty hunter, ruthless but at the same time a drunkard and lazy, Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn (Jeff Bridges). The strange duo will be joined by a Texas ranger who has long been on Chaney's trail, LeBouef (Matt Damon). It doesn’t seem a coincidence that to portray Cogburn, one of the iconic actors of the Coen brothers, Jeff Bridges, whose Dude shares more than one trait with the old bounty hunter, has returned after 12 years.

Mattie will find herself traveling with two companions who represent two different stereotypes of America: the democratic duty of LeBouef and Rooster Cogburn’s desire to live against every imposed rule, although the young girl often doesn’t spare them sharp and incisive remarks. From the beginning of her adventure, Mattie is endowed with an incredibly strong will, to the point of seeming like the adult and the constantly arguing LeBouef and Cogburn like children she must take care of. However, the adventure she will experience will also allow her to grow internally and mature.

Perhaps one of the most negative aspects of the film is focusing too much on the Mattie-Rooster dualism, relegating the Texas ranger and the outlaw Chaney to mere side characters, a surprising aspect for the two brothers whose balance among the various characters has always been exemplary. There are moments (few, to be honest) that are typically "Coenian" such as the pancake shooting contest or the encounter with a creepy dentist covered in bear skin.

Another fundamental theme of the film is the sense of the passage of time and a certain underlying melancholy: the story is narrated by an adult Mattie Ross, who will not be able to reunite with her old friend Rooster and will transfer his casket to the family cemetery. The melancholy for bygone times, however, can be extended to the entire western genre, and it is perhaps in this context that this film should be framed, a respectful homage to an unrepeatable era from both a historical and a cinematic point of view, and this is possibly the reason why the typical Coen style emerges less frequently than in other films.

RATING = 7.5