![]() ![]() Formally, True Grit is a Western, so of course horses are everywhere. True Grit adapts Charles Portis’ grim 1968 novel, bypassing the slushy 1969 adaptation which starred a late-career John Wayne as Rooster. It is one of the rare times she smiles in the entire film. ![]() When she sees him and strokes his face, she smiles for the first time. Like her, he is a dark horse (the darkest one in the barn). She picks him out herself-a small, sleek, dark brown gelding she names Little Blackie. Since Mattie needs a horse for this journey, she buys back one of the ponies she has just sold. The Marshal is a crotchety, wobbly older man named Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), and joining their party to catch her father’s murderer is a patronizing Texas Ranger known as LeBoeuf (Matt Damon). Then, she orchestrates of the re-sale of several horses and ponies in order to pay the Marshal and supply herself with provisions to accompany him on the journey. Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld, in an Oscar-nominated performance) spends a significant portion of the film’s first act simply negotiating with adults far less articulate or self-possessed than she is-completing, among many other tasks, the hire of a United States Marshal to hunt down and take into custody the man who killed her father. She ends up firmly negotiating with the undertaker about the price, declaring ultimately that his terms are acceptable if he allows her to sleep in his mortuary, among the bodies, as she will have no more money left to pay for lodgings. We learn this from her first scene, in which she, a fourteen-year-old girl with braided pigtails, arrives in a small Western town to retrieve the body of her murdered father. Mattie Ross, the heroine of the True Grit, is tough. She chooses a little one with a lot of spunk who seems a lot like her. Its journey begins slightly hopefully, with a girl picking out the horse she will ride on the quest. But it doesn’t start out this way, entirely. It is a bleak, cynical, nihilistic film, about a grim journey. True Grit, the 2010 Coen Brothers film, has a slightly different attitude towards its horses, but this is because it has a slightly different attitude towards everyone, especially its cowboys. Horse deaths usually mark two things: that its rider has lost a critical tool for survival, as well as the tragedy that a creature so statuesque and powerful has been destroyed by petty human interference. And it’s jarring to see such a giant, muscular, balanced creature as a horse awkwardly tumble down. There’s usually a shriek, and a patter of horseshoes. ![]() It means a lot when a horse dies in a Western-and it’s always startling to watch. In the Western, no figure is more vulnerable than the horse, particularly because eliminating the horse both incapacitates and exposes the cowboy, who is usually the real target. Sometimes they are the cowboy’s only friend in the world. Sometimes they are a simple ride out of town. The job of the horse in a Western is to be both ordinary and special-ubiquitous vehicles as much as they are close companions. ![]() Anyway, I watch Westerns worried for the horses. A horse is a horse is a horse is a horse, except in a Western, in which a horse is a horse while also often embodying something deeply metaphorical. ![]()
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