I'd never seen a Coen brothers film until last night when I caught a late showing of True Grit. I haven't really enjoyed that many Westerns before, but I found this one to be fascinating. Funnier than any Ben Stiller farce of the last ten-twelve years, True Grit also leaves you with some things to chew on when you're driving home (and in my case, trying to fall asleep afterwards).
The most interesting character, I think, is the little girl who hires a broken-down drunk U.S. Marshall to hunt down the man who killed her daddy. At first I was impressed with her impudence and moxy. She is perfectly able to get what she wants from whomever she wants it, and she won't take no for an answer. Her determination to get justice for her father's murder at first pulls you in, and you want to like her, and cheer for her, and see her succeed. "I am almost-Woman, hear me roar! I can beat you boys at your own game!" and all that good stuff.
She gets her man in the end, and survives the ordeal, but look at the consequences: she turns into a hard old maid with no time or desire for marraige or love or any other such foolishness. She locks away her affection for an old drunk who did her a kindness once at a vulnerable spot in her life. She mourns him, but with no tears. I doubt that she has cried ever since her daddy died and she lost her innocence getting "justice."
As I watched the credits roll, and chewed on what I had just seen, I was heartbroken for this little girl. Here she is at 14, thrown into a world where she has to take care of everything, has to be the aggressor without a daddy to take care of her. She watches death being dealt in brutal ways, losing her innocence along the way. She has to be hard and relentless, and while it helps her to get difficult tasks accomplished, it also leaves no cracks for her inner beauty to shine through. By the time she is a grown woman at the end of the movie, there is nothing soft and attractive about her, nothing inviting or warm or gentle. She has been hurt and wounded, and she's fighting back.
I walked away wondering if this movie wasn't about a manhunt, or about getting revenge for a father's murder at all - I wondered if it was a movie explaining how a bitter old woman became a bitter old woman. ('Cause there's always a story of HOW that happens, right?) I wonder if maybe the directors were giving us a glance into the heart of women who are abandoned to the world with no strong men in their world to provide a safe place for their beautiful hearts to blossom and reveal themselves. Sure, she may not take any crap from anyone, and she may get (most of) what she wants, but at the end of her life she's hard, and she's alone, staring down at the graves of the only two father figures she got to have - the father who died abruptly when she was 14, and the marshall who helped her get her revenge.
So, even though I laughed more during this movie than I have at a movie in years, I walked away saddened at what our fallen world has done to women - and I'm more committed than ever to being the kind of man who allows his wife to become everything she was meant to be, and who raises his sons to do the same for their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers.
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