Fridae

Maybe the Coen brothers planned it all along – every few years, they’d make a film in a completely different genre and they’d make it good enough to win an Oscar or two. There isn’t too much that the Coens haven’t touched that hasn’t turned to gold and True Grit, unsurprisingly, is a very good film despite it being a remake and all that.

Hailee Steinfeld plays a precocious 14-year-old who engages the meanest US Marshal (Jeff Bridges) in town to track down the man (Josh Brolin) who killed her father, while a Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) may be out to foil her revenge. The casting is pitch perfect. But for the remake, the Coens decide that staying closer to the witty tone of the original novel may not be a bad thing at all.

For the most part, the Coens do succeed, bringing out the inherent comedy of the situation. To audiences, westerns tend to depict a violent and lawless reality whose atmosphere is every bit as enjoyable and delectable as it is horrifying and brutal. In other words, westerns are a very early form of horror-comedy. That of course was the contribution to cinema by directors like Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah but in the original novel, Charles Portis managed to bring out the horror-comedy by throwing an incongruous character into the western setting.

That character is of course Mattie Ross, played here by Hailee Steinfeld. However crapsack the world is in a western, we don’t really get to see an innocent (or someone who is as close to being innocent in the world of westerns) ride out in glory on a life-threatening and probably doomed adventure. Portis and the Coens go further by making Mattie a western equivalent of a modern comedy’s potty-mouthed kid character.

Most of the laughs in this film come the darnest things adults say when they’re faced with a kid pointing a gun in their face or the darnest things a kid with a gun can say to grown, hardened, violent men of the world – usually right after a violent exchange. Kudos go to Hailee Steinfeld for pulling this off brilliantly, and to Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges for playing up to her acting in a manner that underscores the situational comedy (but not the slapstick) buried in the Portis work.

The western is a genre that has reached a dead-end in its evolution – it’s practically impossible to surpass the old masters. But for the Coen brothers, it’s just another milestone in their Oscar-lined career.