Ruth's True Grit

No Stats!
So the movie True Grit...It is the latest Coen Brother's film (I have enjoyed their Oh Brother Where Art Thou?). I saw Grit last week with Greg (can believe I haven't seen that guy in 7 months! Dang, time just slips away sometimes. I need to warn you, I watched the movie with an empty stomach, so my recollections could be completely fallacious. My typically jarring and disonant style will be even more cacophonous than normal due to the distance between my viewing of the film and this review.

"This review"...now that's funny. This is not a review; this is a string of vaguely related memories and incongruent references to other movies, places, and books, so without further mumblings, I give you TRUE GRIT:
The movie opens with this quote "The wicked flee when none pursueth."-Proverbs 28:1. This can be taken two ways, either the pursuers are of no consequence or there are no good people in the movie and all are fleeing from nothing.
The story is of a little (in years but not in guts and common sense) girl whose father is murdered by a field hand who has a long history of murder and theft. She goes to town to see to her father's affairs. We are introduced to Mattie Ross when she goes to see the man who her father had just bought some ponies from. She negotiates through tortious-threat and continual appeals to his self-interest and totally dominates the negotiations getting an amazing deal for the loss of her father's horse stolen by Chaney, her father's killer. It is obvious that she is tough and very intelligent from this point (she reminds me of two people who have crossed my road, that blend of steel and love is rare). She nets $300 which enables her to hire Rooster Cogburn a man who she says has "True Grit". He is an alcoholic marshall for hire who over the course of his colorful career admitted to killing 24 men bound by law. He is a man lacking any ruth. Which coincidentally is a book I just read. Are their subtle literary and socio-political parallels between this ancient text and the post-modern telling of a 1870 tale of justice? Well...Um...since you are the one who asked...Now remember you are at fault for asking...Not me...I have no blame in this, but here goes:
In Ruth, there is a man named Boaz. He dares to redeem the widow Ruth who is a foreigner who was converted to the Hebrew faith, loyally served her destitute mother-in-law Naomi, and traveled a long distance to a strange new land in hopes of fresh opportunity. The whole story is one of the faithfulness of God and the redemption of a desperate woman from tragedy into the most important family line in history. You see she is the great great...great grand mother of Jesus the Christ. The whole book is a slow progression starting with the sad death of Naomi's two sons and the resulting poverty. Through several unlikely and providential events Boaz enters the scene and serves and defends the women until at the very end (right when you ask, "Okay that was a nice story but what is the point?") the curtain is pulled back and we see that this Ruth is the grandmother of King David.
In True Grit, this young "Ruth" faces a horrible tragedy with stolid determination. Her father's money is stolen, her provider and protector is gone. She travels from the family's distant homestead to town in hopes of setting things to right. The whole system is against her, the sheriff says the criminal is long gone into the winderness of the indian lands and is unlikely to be brought to justice. She doggedly pursues justice and finds an unlikely "Boaz" in the one-eyed marshall. She hires him and by pure courage joins him in the pursuit of justice for her father. A Texas ranger, who is also in the hunt for Chaney the murderer, crosses their path (played by Matt Damon a drawling caricature of the Lone Star's gunslingers). They work to track the evil doer and serve justice at the point of a six-gun. Through purely providential means they find Chaney and his gang. The first of the movie's three climaxes shows the marshall facing down four armed men alone in an open field. Up to this point, the stories he has told Mattie seem like braggadocious hubris. But we see the true grit of this man when he charges all four outlaws on horse back with reigns in his teeth and a big iron in each fist. He kills three and the fourth shoots his horse down pinning the lawman. The shot-up ranger sights in his "Sharp's Carbine...a weapon of uncanny power and precision" and shoots the last outlaw from 300 yards. Mattie finds herself confronting her father's killer and delivers a first-class ticket to God's judgement courtesy of Sharp's carbine.
The second climax of the film comes when Rooster runs a horse to death at knife-point to save Mattie's life (the audience's reaction to the "animal cruelty" was odd, either the horse dies or Mattie dies, why did everyone gasp when the horse is run to death to save her life?)
In the end, Mattie's pursuit of justice is satisfied, Marshall Cogburn saves her life, and the underlying metaphor of redemption is hammered again and again.
The cinematography was okay; the hard feel of the film was reinforced by the cold and desolate landscapes used for a back drop. The best part of the film was the dialog, it was clipped and verbose (yes they are antonyms) yet deeply cynical and darkly hilarious. This movie is not the Coen's best but entertaining.