“TRUE GRIT” MOVIE (2010)

“True Grit” Movie (2010)

“True Grit” Movie (2010)

Introduction

True Grit (2010) is a US movie directed and written by the Coen brothers. The movie is based on the famous novel of Charles Portis (1968). The movie has the following cast:

Mattie Ross (Elizabeth Marvel)

Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges)

LaBoeuf (Matt Damon)

Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin)

The move is recited by an adult Mattie Ross (Elizabeth Marvel). She tells that when she was 14, her father was killed by Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). After killing, he ran away with her father's two gold pieces and a horse. True Grit  is a first-person narrative. The narrator-protagonist, Mattie Ross, is fourteen, the same age Huck was when he experienced his adventures on the mighty Mississippi. Mattie's narration, however, strikes a very different tone from Huck's for two reasons. First, Mattie is looking back over a period of fifty years on the events she recounts. Second, Mattie was much the same at fourteen as she is in her sixties, the kind of girl who is an adult from birth. This paper discusses and argues how the movie “True Grit” (2010) represents the age positively. It also discusses how Mattie is a realistic teen character and she was acting her age.

Discussion

Cogburn and LaBoeuf constitute an odd couple. Although they are separated in age by only a decade, LaBoeuf is of a new order and Cogburn is of the old. LaBoeuf is well-groomed, wears large shining spurs, goes by the book, and has acquired skills and judgment from training and discipline. Cogburn, resembling President Grover Cleveland in mien, girth, and moustache, is something of an outlaw turned lawman. He has only one eye, is slovenly in dress, drinks self-indulgently, and makes more errors in judgment than he cares to acknowledge. (Barnes, 2010)

Much of the narrative develops the respect that each of the three pursuers comes to have for the other two. Mattie holds her own in the rigors of outdoor living and keeps up with the two seasoned lawmen; Cogburn and LaBoeuf grow to respect and, often grudgingly, to rely upon each other.

Mattie Ross, the narrator-protagonist, a fourteen-year-old girl who has been an adult since birth. Mattie is narrating the story fifty years after her grand adventure. Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn, a U.S. deputy marshal for the western district of Arkansas. He has a questionable past, having fought as a guerrilla rather than as a regular soldier during the Civil War. He is approaching middle age, has lost an eye, has grown fat, and drinks too much. Mattie needs a man with grit, however, to run down her father's murderer. Cogburn appears to possess that commodity in abundance, as he has killed twenty-three men in the past four years. (Reed, 2010)

The setting is Arkansas and the Indian Territory in the late 1870's. Mattie lives on a farm in Yell County, Arkansas, located near Dardanelle, an Old South settlement on the banks of the Arkansas River. Mattie's father, Frank Ross, travels on business to Fort ...