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For over a quarter century Joel and Ethan Coen have quietly become one of the most dependable forces in American cinema. Their last four films came out less than a year apart, and each is within in its own right a sprawling odyssey, completely dissimilar from anything else in the Coen brother’s already considerable body of work. True Grit fits comfortably into this pattern.

True Grit follows the story of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), a young girl dealing with the aftermath of her father’s murder. She doggedly recruits Deputy U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to pursue her father’s killer into Choctaw territory. They are soon joined by Texas Ranger La Boeuf (Matt Damon) and the merry trio sets off on a finely tuned adventure.

Mattie carries herself with an exaggerated maturity, and the Coen’s screenplay develops her with an effortless mix of desperate determination and comic seriousness. Bridges plays Cogburn with an exaggerated loutishness, and the Coens harness this energy to great effect. Whereas it would have been easy to fall back on writing a simple “badass with a heart of gold” character, this iteration of Cogburn is completely sincere in his sociopathic boorishness. However when Cogburn does show compassion, it is not a departure from the character as much as a manifestation of morality through a vehicle still riddled with tragic character flaws.

Rather than approaching True Grit as a remake of the 1969 original, the Coen brothers have combined elements from the original film, the original novel and many of their own inventions. The result beckons no comparison to the original, it is a re-imagining, and merely tells a similar story in a distinctively Coen manner.

-Paul Brinnel