Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch True Grit
2010 · Joel Coen · True Grit on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen to Steinfeld speak without a single contraction. (performance)
Mattie talks in Portis's archaic, contractual formality, with no contractions and no sentimentality, and Hailee Steinfeld sustains it in every scene without letting it turn into a stunt.
Payoff: Her language is her weapon, and you hear a child who has decided to be old already.
Watch Mattie enter a room and refuse to leave. (staging)
The Coens stage her negotiations as contests for ground. She comes in, declines to be dismissed, and controls the exits while grown men try to wave her off.
Payoff: The comedy comes out of where she stands as much as out of what she says.
Notice there is no golden hour anywhere in this Western. (light)
Roger Deakins keeps the light flat, cold or firelit, over a desaturated palette of ochre and gray-brown. Campfires supply the only warmth in the film, and it always looks precarious.
Payoff: The genre's usual glow is withheld, so the West arrives as weather rather than as myth.
Watch how long lenses flatten riders against the plain. (camera)
Deakins composes on long focal lengths that compress figure and landscape, and the anamorphic frame opens cold empty space around people. The camera moves only when something motivates it.
Payoff: The country dwarfs them without ennobling them, which is not how this genre usually works. In the reading: the encompasser. The reading calls the Territory a synsign, the encompasser: a whole situation pressing on people until someone must act.
Listen for the hymn tune returning under the riding scenes. (sound)
Carter Burwell scores with arrangements of nineteenth-century Protestant hymns, chiefly Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, played by a soloist or small ensemble instead of a full orchestra.
Payoff: The music belongs to the world of the story, and it turns the adventure elegiac while it is still going on.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: The story is already over when it starts. Listen for the older woman telling it while you watch.