I should say at the outset that I never saw John Wayne’s version of True Grit. It is perhaps looked upon fondly? All I really know of it is that he got an Oscar for it, but it was one of those times where he deserved it for other movies and not this one but the Academy had missed its better opportunities and only finally got around to it now. Which as you can imagine is not a very strong selling point. Either way, I haven’t, and I’m not very strongly inclined to now, since I think it would be a pretty huge let-down after watching the Coens’ version.

The plot of True Grit is a very simple one, and I guess that’s true of all westerns? Either way, it fits quite well and I think something more complicated wouldn’t have been that good at all. A teenage girl’s father is murdered[1], and she hires a one-eyed U.S. Marshal because she has been told he is a man with true grit, so that they can hunt down the coward Tom Chaney who perpetrated the foul deed. And, yeah, that’s the whole plot. Which is nice, because it leaves you with another 75 percent of the movie to wander through beautiful vistas while spending time with compelling and compellingly likable characters. And when you consider that a decent portion  of those characters are bad guys, it’s all the more impressive just how likable they are.

Since I’m still thinking about the way I relate to endings, I should note that I really didn’t much like this one; it was essentially the opposite of what I would choose to look for in one, in that I felt like I’d been explicitly told there was a great deal of things left to be done with these characters and I didn’t get to know what, all in exchange for a statement of theme that didn’t really match the rest of the movie. On the whole, that’s the one downside to filming something as close to the book as possible: the book isn’t always right.

[1] This is, after all, the Old West. (Sort of, it’s really Arkansas and Oklahoma, but these were on the frontier in the 1870s.)