True Grit (2010) (PG-13) ★★★★

Review Date: January 3rd, 2011

From the moment Hailee Steinfeld enters the frame in Joel and Ethan Coen's magnificent western True Grit, an adaptation of Charles Portis' 1968 novel (or re-adaptation — John Wayne's 1969 version got to it first), the film belongs to her. This is no easy feat, especially for a 13-year-old actress making her feature-film debut, but Steinfeld not only holds her own alongside such heavyweights as Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin, she often upstages them.

The film, which is set in the 1870s, stars Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a pigtailed 14-year-old sent to the frontier town of Fort Smith, Arkansas, to settle the affairs of her deceased father, an honorable man murdered for two gold pieces by a monstrous simpleton named Tom Chaney (Brolin). Mattie also comes seeking justice: Chaney is still at large, having escaped to the dangerous, foreboding expanse of the Indian Territory, and she intends to see to it that he is captured and brought to trial.

Frustrated by the local authorities' ambivalence toward tracking down her father's killer, Mattie, turns to Rooster Cogburn (Bridges), a slovenly, alcoholic U.S. Marshal renowned for his cruelty and itchy trigger finger. Were there a Miranda warning in 1870s, Cogburn would have little use for it; chances are, few of his perps would understand it through his grouchy, guttural slur anyway.

Pleading to join their makeshift posse is LaBoeuf (Damon), a pompous, upright, and overly chatty Texas Ranger — the Good Cop to Cogburn's Bad Cop — who covets Chaney's Texas bounty, which holds more value than his Arkansas bounty. Cogburn agrees reluctantly to take him on, recognizing that Chaney, now likely holed up with his criminal gang, a vicious bunch headed by a spittle-spewing snaggletooth named Lucky Ned (Barry Pepper), is too formidable to approach alone. Cogburn and LaBoeuf are natural rivals, and long rides on the trail of Chaney afford them ample time for dick-measuring contests, which invariably necessitate the intervention of their teenage mother hen, Mattie.

Mattie may be the most mature member of the posse, but she is nonetheless still a child — eventually, the job of exacting final vengeance must fall upon the men with guns. Here, Mattie's stout heart has an ennobling effect on Cogburn, who, after briefly giving up during a booze-fueled bout with self-doubt, stiffens his resolve to see things through.

Compared to its predecessor, the Coen Brothers' version of True Grit is both funnier and less sentimental. There is little room for tenderness or romance on the Coens' frontier, but opportunities abound for the kind of black humor for which the writer-directors have become so famous. As in Fargo, they have a great deal of fun with language; characters speak in a laughably rigid, formalized manner almost Shakespearian in its tongue-twisting complexity. The film's ironic conceit, that such codes thrive in a land ruled by violence and chaos, is best illustrated in Mattie's constant, almost charmingly naive threats of legal action against her adversaries. They react to her threats with a kind of befuddled amusement; the phrase ''I'll see you in court'' is still several decades away from joining the popular lexicon.

Critics often bemoan the abundance of remakes in modern, risk-averse Hollywood. A more productive strategy, at least for the cause of quality filmmaking, might be to properly exalt the better ones. This True Grit may be the best of them, combining the look and feel of a classic western with a distinctly Coens brothers tone. And Ms. Steinfeld is nothing short of a revelation.

Hollywood.com rated this film 4 stars.