 |
Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross.
(Photo: Mary Ellen Mark; Courtesy of Paramount Pictures) |
True Grit, written by Charles Portis in 1968, is a plainspoken adventure tale set in the 1880s. It centers on the memories of Mattie Ross, who, as a 14-year-old, hired a dissolute, one-eyed lawman named Rooster Cogburn to find and kill the drifter who murdered her father. The book was first turned into a film in 1969, with Mattie (Kim Darby) relegated to Cogburn’s sidekick, thanks to the unmistakable top-of-the-credits star playing him, John Wayne. In interpreting the part, the Duke sacrificed a lot of crust for a good deal of ham. Country music’s reigning nice guy, Glen Campbell, co-starred as La Boeuf, a Texas Ranger who joins in the search. It was, all an all, pretty clean-cut for a Western.
When Joel and Ethan Coen make a Western, it’s as far from clean as you can get. In their truly gritty, violent, wittier-than-you-might-think, and much-anticipated adaptation (opening December 22), Cogburn is played with greasy bluff by Jeff Bridges (reuniting with the Coens for the first time since The Big Lebowski), La Boeuf by a wisecracking, mustachioed Matt Damon, and Mattie by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld.
In the Coens’ version, Mattie is again the driving force of the story, a proper girl from a Christian home�no longer Darby’s pixie but solid and unnervingly tense. Through the course of the film, as Mattie and Rooster hunt down the bad guy (Josh Brolin), they both come of age: She grows up fast, and he faces his demons and the end of his life. Of the 15,000 actresses who auditioned, 13-year-old Steinfeld was the one whose �unusually steely nerves and straightforward manner��to quote the casting notice�won her the coveted role. �She’s a very poised, clever girl,� says producer Scott Rudin. �She could handle ornate language, which a lot of the kids couldn’t.�
Steinfeld herself is sweet and excitable, with an endearingly goofy chuckle that punctuates her stories�like her description of a typical day on the True Grit set. �We were in some really crazy remote locations,� she says, �and half the time, I was lying in the dirt. There are more pictures of me playing with, like, random rocks in the dirt than any other pictures.�