True grit

The Coen brothers, renowned for offbeat indie movies, are not averse to working on mainstream remakes of classic period pieces. They and Tom Hanks clearly had fun reworking (and failing to outshine) the British comedy thriller, The Ladykillers, and the brothers' latest commercial gig is True Grit.

The new version of John Wayne's Oscar-winner should have been a smooth-riding vehicle for Jeff Bridges, a natural casting choice for Wayne's role as garrulous, one-eyed, drunkard Marshall Rooster Cogburn. Instead, the Coens focused on newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, playing self-assertive Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old girl determined to avenge the shooting death of her father by a bandit.

Josh Brolin is wasted in that role, seen in a few scenes at the end. The story's only other key role is the Texas Ranger who joins the girl and her marshal. Matt Damon seems not so much out of his depth as pushed into the shallows by the production; his role's personality should be a stronger contrast to that of the marshal. Instead, Damon dead-pans, downplays his character's territorial arrogance, and shows little body language. There's more panache in Roger Deakins' long-distance landscape cinematography.

The Coens may have wanted to let the story speak for itself, but the interactions between the characters seem dreadfully, non-dramatically, tediously under-stated. Apart from them, though, the Coens' usual ability to elicit forceful supporting cameos is delightfully clear.

The original novel by Charles Portis was a teasing portrayal of Wild West conventions, simultaneously glorifying and satirising them. It was an incredible tale of an insufferably pious girl learning the facts of adulthood, not Life. She naively pursues her father's killer into Indian territory, accompanied unwillingly by a pair of contrasting old-style lawmen, gains retribution and falls into a life-threatening snake pit. With the book, readers are left to wonder whether adult Mattie, rich and religious and lonely, has invented much of her wild western story.

The Coens toned down the girl's self-righteous arrogance, but they rightly kept the book's display of artfully well-mannered and long-winded 19th-Century English-language usage. That helps, as in the book, to portray all the characters as belonging to an era that looked and sounded very different to modern America. Portis mocked and admired his characters; the Coens seem tired and not amused by them, making this audience member tire of the poorly-paced movie well before it ended.

Steinfeld, a Californian of Filipino descent, was the same age as Mattie when she made the movie (her first feature after a few shorts and TV appearances). Her reported fee of US$100,000 was a bargain for a leading role in a low-budget ($38 million) movie that grossed a quarter of a billion (and still counting) for producers Rudin, Spielberg and the Coens. The young actress surely boosted word-of-mouth recommendations, and she gained a slew of deserved nominations and awards. Her next role is supposedly stellar: she's been signed for a re-make of Romeo and Juliet rewritten by the UK's prolific peer of upper-class sitcoms, Julian Fellowes. Her co-star is not yet cast, making the project a doubly iffy choice for the budding star.