MOVIE REVIEW: True Grit

I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t love this movie as much as everybody else. I liked it, I didn’t love it. In “True Grit,” the Coen brothers play it very straight. The masters of caustic satire return to the western, but not with the tension of “Blood Simple” or the bizarre wickedness of “No Country for Old Men.” Instead, their adaptation of the 1968 Charles Portis novel (and not, it must be stressed, the 1969 Academy Award-winning John Wayne vehicle) is largely a return to the genre’s classical form.

The elements for a success — albeit not of the sort one typically expects from the Coens — are there: sharp banter, flawed lawmen and the imposingly beautiful Roger Deakins-helmed images of characters set against the endless Texan (Arkansas in the tale) countryside. In true Coen fashion, a classic is repeatedly evoked: “The Night of the Hunter,” in the haunting rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” on the soundtrack, figures facing an unknown, tangible terror and the ways pockets and bursts of light illuminate the characters’ hardened faces.

Yet in spite of all the movie does right, it succumbs to a pervasive rote quality that latches onto the journey of United States Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) and 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), who has hired the former to avenge the murder of her father.

“True Grit” is never funny enough or tense enough for the approach to work. The humor is found in Mr. Bridges’s misguided approach to Cogburn, playing him as an indecipherable drunk, and the character’s growling about Texas versus Arkansas boys, etc., with Mr. Damon’s better-conceived egotistical LaBoeuf. The search for Chaney is secondary to the squabbling and as such — despite the best efforts of newcomer Hailee Steinfeld — never takes on the urgency that should accompany the pursuit. The danger of such an ambitious sojourn through lawless territory is submerged by its overarching one-dimensionality, the bad guy’s overall lack of screen time and the concurrent downgrading of the proceedings from a life-or-death struggle to a fun adventure for the trio.

If you’re dead set on seeing it, you better run out and see it soon. I don’t see it sticking around for long regardless of its great reviews. It is not worth renting as the best thing about the movie, the cinematography, will be lost on a TV (unless you have a 72 inch flat screen).