by Louis Williams

Created on: January 21, 2011

True Grit

As pictured here, Charles Portis’s novel comes off like something written by Rider Haggard, particularly “King Solomon’s Mines,” where the principals literally go off the map into a region where the dress, food, ethics, and morality are all different from what they are in civilized places such as Nineteenth Century Arkansas.

All right, that’s going too far. Still, when fourteen year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) and her hired deputy marshal, Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), head west into Indian Territory with the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), in search of Frank Cheyney (Josh Brolin), murderer of Mattie’s father, they might as well be headed for the Mountains of the Moon. Rooster, a widely experienced lawman and crook, knows this, as does LaBoeuf; Mattie is there to learn, and does. By the end of her time in Indian Territory she’s killed her man, Cheyney, lost an arm to a rattlesnake, and seen enough grotesque violence to last her the rest of her life. That she is clearly a Puritan doesn’t mean that sympathy is one of her virtues, however. She wades in blood the way, a few years earlier, she might have waded in a kiddie pool, if such had been available then. Beneath the fair skin and the sexually innocent eyes there is a constitution of pure granite.

Or maybe it’s grit. She goes looking for a lawman-tracker who has “true grit,” and shows throughout that having it isn’t something you acquire, but something you’re born with. You get the feeling that, if she had been a marshal in the Indian Territory, she would have cleaned the place up in about three days, with, at the end, a mass burial of Bads that would have stretched to the horizon. Young and pretty though she may be, she is a tougher customer than either of the men she rides with.

As Rooster, Jeff Bridges has one of his finest hours. Slovenly, usually drunk, murderous when he has to be, dishonest when his Hobbesean life demands it, he is yet true to his word once a bargain has been struck. He is also obviously a lover of violence, a wanderer who enjoys a scrap, however murderous it may turn out. He may simply, for reasons he never tells us, want to die and has chosen marshalling as the quickest road to get there. He clearly knows that living as he does will sooner or later get him killed and likely leave him a pile of bones on the prairie. The life he tells us he’s lived is a nightmare of murder and

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