The magic of the Coen Brothers‘ 2010 True Grit adaptation is that they get 14-year-old female spunk exactly right.  Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) possesses intellect, courage, and idealism that brought to mind Mary Pipher’s 1994 book Reviving Ophelia, which argues that before puberty girls are the most confident humans on the planet. Fourteen is a golden age of feminine aplomb, and Joel and Ethan Coen have a track record of portraying strong women.  From Abby (Frances McDormand), a killer’s lone survivor in Blood Simple (1984), to  Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) in No Country for Old Men (2007), the Coens show women who have presence and gravity. Facing nihilistic murderer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who would make her life depend on a coin toss, Carla Jean Moss reasons steadily, “The coin don’t have no say.  It’s just you.”  She is one of the bravest characters in recent cinema.

Unlike the two female characters just noted, Mattie Ross begins her story with that standard of the Western genre, a moral mission.  Grown-up Mattie’s voice-over relates a tragedy without quavering.  Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), a halfwit outlaw Mattie’s father tried to help, murdered him and fled to the Choctaw Nation.  No one from town pursued him.  The sheriff merely chalked Chaney’s name onto a sprawling list of fugitives.  Mattie’s mother was too weak to put any of the family’s affairs in order.  Mattie depicts her mother as a woman who can “hardly spell cat,” not to mention being “hobbled by grief,” hesitant, and bad at math.  Frank Ross’s murder would have caused hardly a ripple had not his daughter strutted into Fort Smith.

As Mattie barters and reasons, inciting sloths to action and misers to justice, Steinfeld’s performance shows a naïve, honest face trying on adult resolve. Just like she rolls up the sleeves of her father’s wool suit and wears it jauntily, she also wears a resolve she’ll soon grow into more fully.  Yet the resolve she shows from the film’s beginning is nothing to trifle with.  She talks quickly and firmly, looks adults in the eye, knows the law, and drives a hard bargain.  She doesn’t reciprocate when women hug her or consent to have women fuss over her.  Mattie doesn’t flout nineteenth century feminine conventions so much as she just can’t be bothered with them.  Her moral mission is primary; nothing, especially not other people’s expectations, must bar her way.  And thus, she’s known as “a harpy in trousers” who gives “very little sugar with [her] pronouncements,” and has admirable “sand.”

Mattie thinks she’s an able match for the mission conferred on her.  She has the larger-than-life feelings of an adolescent without the discernment experience brings.  She compares a search for a murderer to a coon hunt at which all the campers tell ghost stories.  When she employs the meanest U.S. Marshal–Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges)– to chase Tom Chaney down, Mattie figures that his meanness means he has grit and that their mutual bravery makes them equals.

But when the story hits its three-quarter mark, the hunt fits Texas Ranger LaBoeuf’s (Matt Damon) assessment precisely: it’s gone from “manhunt” to “debauch.”  If Rooster fits Mattie’s ideal of a man with true grit, what’s he doing sloshing liquor?  Slumping nearly out of his saddle?  Firing a pistol at cornbread?  (Jeff Bridges is fantastic here, becoming even more of a lowlife than The Dude).  Mattie tells LaBoeuf, “I picked the wrong man.”

And so it would seem, except that Carter Burwell’s soundtrack keeps playing that redemptive refrain, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  Perhaps something more than Mattie’s own arms sustain her.  “The author of all things watches over me,” she says as she rides off on her mission.  In True Grit, the author of all things works through friendship, through people who can’t quite forget each other.

Around this three-quarter mark, questions of character development rather than the moral mission’s resolution became central to me.  Mary Pipher’s conclusion in Reviving Ophelia is not just that prepubescent girls have grit, but that societal pressure and hormonal upheaval chop vibrant young women into fragmented selves– the socially acceptable woman and the real self.  Pipher quotes Diderot, who said of women, “You all die at 15.”  So the question I wanted answered as I watched Cogburn, Ross, and sometimes LaBoeuf press on across the snowy plains was not will they catch Tom Chaney but will Mattie ‘die’ at 15? Will she become “hobbled” like her mother?

Kathleen Norris writes that “all too often… we find that our journey from girlhood to womanhood is an exile to an ‘alien soil.'”  Norris compares reaching womanhood with the Israelite captivity; women are asked to sing songs and appear happy in a land not their own.  Adult Mattie Ross will find herself on a turf where men rule and act and vote.  I wondered, will she outlast this pressure?

Without giving too much away, I will say it’s unsettling that there’s something witch-like in the closing shot of aged Mattie heading, alone, toward the horizon.  Her silhouette’s a bit like Miss Gulch‘s in the Wizard of Oz.  Her closing narration wrangles with people’s assessments of her, which must have gathered force throughout her life.  “Isn’t she a cranky old maid?” Mattie says people say about her.  In the novel, Charles Portis goes further and Mattie’s closing lines continue, “People love to talk.  They love to slander you if you have any substance.”   Thus, the final shot makes me think Mattie became one of many women slandered for being strong; I grieve because of the unjust loneliness of an outspoken woman.

Blood Simple Charles Portis Ethan Coen Hailee Steinfeld Jeff Bridges Joel Coen Kathleen Norris Mary Pipher Matt Damon No Country for Old Men