It’s got 10 Oscar nods – but what is ‘True Grit’?

Every year, it seems, there’s one Oscar-nominated film which comes as a complete surprise to British cinema-goers – because we have never heard of it. Last year, it was Crazy Heart, for which Jeff Bridges was nominated for best actor, an award he went on to win. This year, it’s another Jeff Bridges movie, True Grit, which received a stunning 10 nominations when the shortlist was announced yesterday and is yet to open in Britain.  

The movie is the 15th directed by the Coen brothers and the opening line of both the film - and the Charles Portis book on which it is based - is a fitting indicator of the mood of True Grit.

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood," the line goes, "but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."
 
The book was first filmed in 1969 with the veteran Hollywood actor John Wayne as the one-eyed US Marshall Rooster Cogburn who helps 14-year-old Mattie search for her father’s killer.

That adaptation, for which Wayne won his only Oscar, was a softer interpretation with a more palatable ending. The Coen brothers, not surprisingly, have gone out of their way to encapsulate the rawness and brutality of the book, giving the film it's true grit.
 
Commenting on the 1969 movie, co-director Ethan Coen said the book was "funnier, a lot tougher and more violent than the movie reflects, which is part of what's interesting about it." He and his brother Joel were keen to recapture the oddness of the book, rather than make a "standard Western".
 
Kenneth Turan, writing in the LA Times, feels they have succeeded. "The Coen brothers clearly find a kindred spirit in Portis," he wrote. "His novel is delivered in all of its savage beauty in this thoroughly entertaining movie."
 
The film is shot from the perspective of Mattie, played by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, who is up for best supporting actress Oscar. Hers is a "terrific film debut", says Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "At times, she brings to mind D. H. Lawrence’s famed formulation that 'the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer'."
 
Jeff Bridges, as Rooster Cogburn, acts sublimely drunk the entire time, and has again been nominated for best actor. Others in the cast include Matt Damon and No Country For Old Men's Josh Brolin who plays the villain Tom Chaney.
 
Despite the film becoming the Coen brothers' highest grossing film in the United States, where it opened just before Christmas, one of the few British critics to have reviewed it was unimpressed. The Guardian’s Xan Brooks bemoaned an "inherently conservative" film with "no interest in poking fun at the genre" and concluded: "True Grit is lean spare and unadorned; modest almost to a fault."
 
Decide for yourself when it opens in Britain on February 11. ·