Muriel Awards Countdown to Best Picture: #2

True Grit [180 points / 20 votes]

"My recurring dream, as a young girl, was that the world needed saving and nary an adult was willing nor able to do anything about it. I’d fly around, battling evil and righting wrongs, while the adults in my life bumbled about like benevolent buffoons. My father always wore a top hat.

Mattie Ross in True Grit is this dream fully realized, and Hailee Steinfeld inhabits the character like she was born haggling for ponies and bringing evildoers to justice while the language of Charles Portis tumbles acrobatically out of her firmly set jaw. She is a wonder and a force, staring down corrupt businessmen, wayward marshals and the man who killed her daddy while haughtily, scoldingly reminding her companions that she is, “only fourteen years old.”

Mattie is the brilliant center of a film that hits every mark. The Coen Brothers, the Kings of the Remake and the Jesters of Genre, kept very true to the original text, rarely getting cutesy Coeny (the Medicine Man comes to mind). It’s a love affair with the Western, gorgeously shot by Roger Deakins (oooh, that night ride!) and achingly scored by Carter Burwell, playing gracefully with the traditional hymns that disqualified him for Oscar consideration.

The cast supporting Mattie (yes, she is the lead here, Academy) is uniformly marvelous. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn doesn’t reinvent the character canonized by John Wayne, but delves deeper into his true grittiness. His shoot-em-upmanship with Matt Damon’s Texas dandy is the funniest bit in a film that massaged my every emotion. Barry Pepper and Josh Brolin round out the crew of scruffy bad 'uns.

But it is Mattie who moves us. Mattie whose sense of right is unfailing and happens to entail hiring the most ruthless marshal she can find to track down the man who killed her daddy and bring him back dead or alive. Mattie who politely and eloquently bulldozes everyone in her path to get what she wants. Mattie’s insistent, “I want what I want!” is a line my five-year-old echoes instinctively, and one I’ve forgotten completely. Where is my inner Mattie?

My favorite update to the original film calls back to the novel where adult Mattie comes looking for Rooster, who’s already passed away. And adult Mattie? She’s no more willing to take any crap than child Mattie was. We don’t have to lose that strength, that drive, that conviction. True Grit is a nearly perfect film that, as Mattie tells Rooster after a particularly violent interlude, “displayed great poise.”" - Marya Murphy