True Grit (2010)

I reckon there’s been a lot of misjudging around these parts and the biggest culprit is likely to be me. Now the Duke cast a mighty long shadow and it’s regrettable that I took so long to walk out from underneath it to lift my face to the sepiad sun. For a collaboration of a whole passel of people commenced to not only fill those big boots, but made an effectual artistic impression as well.

Saturated with aged colors and textures, the town and costumes are the first signs that give me the notion I’m in for a full immersion and then it’s a done deal when the words come. Words flowing out, out of all manner of mouths: determined, grizzled, tongue mangled, slack jawed, spittle flying. I watch again with the subtitles so I can gather up all of the words that had fallen past me. How came Mattie by way of her vocabulary? Just fourteen and out trading a horse trader? I’m envious and in want of them powerful words. There’s no better sport than word sparring and I figure the film is chuck full of them--lively times.

Memorable scenes are aplenty, but I’m tied up with the starlit run. The great big night sky gives the illusion that, borrowing a line from Clark Gable, “the stars are so close over your head, you feel you could reach up and stir them around.” Worry catches in my throat and I hold out little hope for that horse.

As for misjudging, it’s like what that documentary coach said about how football doesn’t build character, but reveals it. Same goes for man hunting in Choctaw Territory. That particular brand of adversity reveals a lot about the characters of a so called, unattractive girl, a buck-skinned dandy and a washed up bushwhacker marshal. As I see it, observation gives credence to a person, not his trappings. I also fetch something else from this tale. I’d been reading some dialogue from Before Sunrise and the line that came back to my remembrance during this movie was “If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.” Isn’t it in the finding of that which compels Mattie to move Cogburn to her family cemetery? After all, isn’t that what we’re all looking for, to know and be known?