Cast of true grit 2010 movie#
Cast of true grit 2010 serial#

Later on, there is no question of not crying. When, left behind by Rooster and La Boeuf (Matt Damon) out of concern and condescension, she plunges her horse into a river and struggles across to catch them, it is hard not to cry at Mattie’s courage. From the early scene when she outmanoeuvres a wily horse trader with fast talking, daunting maturity and brain-boggling calculation, the girl has the film wrapped around her little finger. She, whose toughest challenge may have been keeping a straight face and sustaining the character’s sombre demeanour, makes Mattie endearing despite her precocious moral certitude and righteous indignation. The chemistry Bridges achieves with 14 year-old, bright-as-a-button newcomer Hailee Steinfeld is magical. It is all the more affecting, then, to watch his Rooster expose himself emotionally, gradually sufficiently touched by young Mattie’s pluck and grit to confide old sorrows entombed in a shrivelled but still beating heart. He’s a hard-drinking, cantankerous, trigger-happy slob at seeming ease with himself. The man Pauline Kael considered “the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that’s ever lived” invests Rooster with a rascally unpredictability that is signature Jeff Bridges. The Dude is his own inimitable man, with no need to try to fit into The Duke’s boots. The odyssey is recounted by Mattie decades later, with her final observations serving as a wistful coda for the Wild West itself, when its memory and monumental men had diminished into travelling-circus entertainment. It is about the most significant experience and relationship of her life, a journey on which a stubborn, resolute child from Yell County, Arkansas, witnessed the depraved violence, the heroism and the loving comradeship of which humanity is capable.

Crucially they have been mindful that this is Mattie Ross’ story. They have mined from Portis every possible wry, dry, absurd or twisted nuance of story, dialogue, incident and character. Joel and Ethan Coen, in returning to the novel, have achieved the same thing they did so brilliantly with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men they have been remarkably true to the novel while also rendering it unmistakably Coen-esque. (It could have been worse: Darby was a late replacement for Mia Farrow.) In any case, the adaptation was turned into Wayne’s rousing showcase. Kim Darby, though a nice enough young actress, was in her twenties and a mother when she played Mattie Ross with her breasts strapped flat and a tomboy’s crop instead of the neatly austere long plaits indispensible to the dour child conjured by Portis. But the casting of pop-charting country singer Glen ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ Campbell as Texas Ranger La Boeuf (pronounced La Beef) was someone’s unfortunate concession to ‘trendiness’ with a misguided suggestion of ‘romantic interest’. It has great, iconic moments, chiefly the “one-eyed fat man” charging four outlaws at a gallop and the indelible final freeze-frame image of Wayne and his favourite horse, Ole Dollar, jumping a fence to immortality. Honestly, though, the 1969 True Grit is not a great film and certainly not as good as the book. At the time, one couldn’t have hoped for better than veteran director Henry Hathaway, with John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn at last roaring his way to the Oscar for Best Actor.

Cast of true grit 2010 serial#

It was inevitable in the 1960s that Charles Portis’ phenomenally popular True Grit, a wonderful and irresistibly cinematic novel that originated as a serial published in the mainstream American weekly magazine The Saturday Evening Post, should be made quickly into a film. True Grit is majestic, not just the stuff of a classic Western but an epic quest with Biblical and mythical tones. Okay, No Country For Old Men is a Western, but a cruelly contemporary one this time out we are taken back to around 1880, when the Choctaw Nation had not yet become Oklahoma, and there are horses and six-guns, outlaws, vigilantes and horse traders, a craggy lawman who is a law unto himself and a Texas Ranger wearing spurs that jingle jangle.

Cast of true grit 2010 movie#

At long last Coen devotees who have yearned to see them make an honest-to-goodness, rootin’ tootin’ Western can attain Movie Nirvana. The Coen Brothers have done it again, and never more exquisitely.