The rest of that line the Coens leave offscreen, but it's worth noting because it speaks to the nature of True Grit's impossibly plucky heroine: ". . . but the righteous are as bold as a lion."
Mattie Ross, all of 14, and played with sublime certitude by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, is that bold lioness. As True Grit begins, the pigtailed girl has arrived in Fort Smith, Ark., to collect the body of her dead father, and to hire a bounty hunter to go after the killer. She fully intends to join in the chase, and the early scenes of Mattie haggling with a stable owner, questioning the bill for her father's coffin, and dogging the one-eyed gunslinger whom she's got in mind for the job reveal just how composed and confident this pip-squeak is. Her acuity, her gumption, her way with words . . . if 2010 has been a great year for women's roles, and it has, then it's essential to put Mattie Ross up there near the top of the list. (And she's a good three years younger than Ree Dolly, the brave backwoods teenager of Winter's Bone.)
As folks who remember John Wayne in the original True Grit well know, the name of the U.S. marshal whom Mattie offers to employ is Rooster Cogburn. Jeff Bridges - whose previous collaboration with the Coens produced cinema's iconic stoner, Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski - plays Cogburn with eye patch and baggy long johns, and with a gruff, grizzled conviction. Cogburn, it can be argued, is a whole lot like Bad Blake - the booze-soaked country balladeer of Crazy Heart, the role that won Bridges his long-overdue best-actor Oscar this year. Neither Blake nor Cogburn is at the top of his game, both keep a bottle (or two) close by out of necessity, and redemption comes in the form of a younger woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal in Crazy Heart) who expects better of the man than he's currently able to show.
