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.
Once you have seen it
Listen to the older Mattie's voice from the first line. (structure)
Elizabeth Marvel narrates the whole film from decades later, so the ride into the Territory is something already finished and already told. The coda states plainly what the voice implies throughout.
Payoff: The adventure plays as an accounting of what grit cost, made by the person who paid the bill. In the reading: mnemosign / image-souvenir. The reading calls the whole film an image-souvenir: a former present summoned from far off and never left again.
Watch Bridges mumble, and count what you cannot catch. (performance)
Bridges plays Cogburn as genuinely ravaged: drunk, half-blind, morally crooked, talking like a man who stopped performing for anyone watching. His heroism arrives desperate before it arrives brave.
Payoff: The frontier marshal gets turned over to show his feeble side, and it is played in the body.
Watch how quickly the open-field charge is over. (cutting)
The Coens, editing as Roderick Jaynes, cut the action brisk and almost casual after two hours of scenes allowed to breathe. Violence lands sudden and provisional instead of choreographed.
Payoff: The shootouts get less screen time than the haggling, which tells you where the film's interest sits.
Look at the empty plot at the end of the story. (setting)
Twenty-five years on, Mattie comes to claim Rooster's body and finds he has been moved. She stands on bare winter ground with the hymn underneath and one sleeve hanging empty.
Payoff: A landscape emptied of its people, spoken over by a voice arriving from a vanished present. In the reading: the archaeological image. The reading calls this a stratigraphic image: bare land that an absent past speaks across, with nothing left to look at.
Carry this in: The story is already over when it starts. Listen for the older woman telling it while you watch.