By MICHAEL WOOD [London Review of Books] – The Coen brothers’ new film [True Grit] restores Mattie to the narrative; it gives her a voice-over and quotes her a lot. The actress who plays her (Hailee Steinfeld) and the designer who dressed her (Mary Zophres) get across a good deal more of the weirdness of this prematurely old child than Kim Darby in the earlier film could ever quite do, in spite of her consistent, energetic engagement with the part. Steinfeld’s long pigtails, too large hat, earnest stare and cautious articulate diction give her an eerie dignity, an authority undiluted by anything as tame as charm: this really is a performance.

The film looks different too: all browns and golds and scruffy interiors; firelight in the evening, and a dusty glow coming through windows by day. There are fine shots of the great outdoors, but the human figures are often lost among trees, and the wider landscapes are flattened out. It’s all mildly hostile, has none of the grandeur of isolation, which is the message old westerns were always peddling – as if everyone in the crowded cinema secretly longed for a sublime and desolate night or two away from it all.

We come much closer to the hangings; the two white men among the condemned get to make speeches, while the Indian just has a black sack pulled unceremoniously over his face. And above all we have Jeff Bridges in place of John Wayne. The two men don’t look all that different: shabby and decaying and old, far older than the character in the book can be, if he dies at the age of 68 and the story takes place a quarter of a century before that. But Bridges is a riskier proposition than Wayne. He feels like a dangerous man, seriously out of control, not playing at decrepitude and disorder.

Continued at the London Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.