http://www.threethousand.com.au/issues/290/What:
True GritWhen:
In cinemas from January 26
Watch the trailer:
Here
Win:
Thanks to Paramount, we have 5 dbls to give away! To enter, email us with the subject 'You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements' melbourne.win@rightanglestudio.com.auPrint Email Share
Sardonic humour has always characterised the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, and their new western is no exception. But True Grit dials down the exuberant clowning, shaggy farce and excruciating nebbishiness that have become Coen trademarks, lifting a startling amount of its action and dialogue directly from the 1968 novel by Charles Portis. Despite this, it's unmistakably a Coen film: impudent and mordantly hilarious. The key is the dialogue - quaint, austere, yet delivered with vaudevillian fluency and timing.
Jeff Bridges delivers his lines like a bear gargling gravel, but Hailee Steinfeld has the tone just right as Mattie Ross, the obstinate 14-year-old who hires dissolute, gun-happy US marshal ‘Rooster' Cogburn (Bridges) to avenge her father's murder by no-goodnik Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). Matt Damon might be the highlight, though, as the third member of the posse. He brings a winning air of offended dignity to the preening Texas Ranger LaBoeuf.
Still, True Grit refuses to ironise the western. The Coens understand the genre's viewing pleasures are moral satisfactions - honour, retribution and redemption. Weaving them into a coming-of-age story makes its grim ending - also lifted from the book - all the more elegiac.
