On the Coen Brothers' True Grit (2010) and what it does differently from the original and the source material.

True Grit is the Coen Brothers' most straightforward film and their most formally precise. It's an adaptation of a novel that was also adapted into a John Wayne vehicle, and the Coen version is more faithful to Portis's source material while also being more formally inventive than the original film.

The central achievement is Hailee Steinfeld's Mattie Ross, who is presented with a moral seriousness and a comic absolutism that the 1969 film couldn't manage because the 1969 film was ultimately about John Wayne.

The Coens are interested in Mattie as a figure of uncompromising principle in a world of compromise. She is fourteen years old and she is the most morally coherent person in every room she enters. This is funny and it's moving and it's the film's argument: moral clarity is most visible in people who haven't yet learned that it's inconvenient.

The ending diverges from what a conventional Western would do, and the deviation is the film's most honest choice: Mattie's victory has a cost that the genre conventions would normally spare her, and the Coens don't spare her.