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When we first see Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, he is an unholy mess of a man. He doesn't speak so much as gargle word-sounding noises through phlegm, his nose is a tessellated bouquet of gin blossoms, and he sways in the breeze like his spine has been pickled. Bridges makes John Wayne's crotchety old chubby Cogburn in the 1969 True Grit look like Mary Poppins; he's a broken-down cowboy whose sole talent is being the meanest motherfucker in the room.
Bridges's Cogburn plays perfectly against Hailee Steinfeld as prim Mattie Ross. Ross is serious, efficient, and curt—a 14-year-old girl so wounded by her father's murder that she emotionally cauterized herself into a robot programmed only for revenge. It's a brilliant pairing because Bridges's Cogburn is nothing but emotion (when he and Ross are on the trail of the killer, Cogburn doesn't stop talking about his feelings for even a second). Toss in Matt Damon's clever turn as a self- important, stuffy Texas ranger named LaBoeuf for comic relief—in another life, it seems, this cowboy would have made a legendarily great accountant—and you've got yourself a great western.
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The Coen brothers forego many of their directorial tics for the sake of the movie—there are very few dazzling camera tricks, for example, allowing the viewer to admire the truly great cinematography. All you're left with are stellar performances, the eerie New Mexico landscape, and the gorgeous language of Charles Portis. Portis—one of the greatest American humorists, possibly third only to Vonnegut and Twain—wrote True Grit in Ross's own voice, and it's as Shakespearean as American English has ever sounded. The lack of contractions give everything an alien cadence—"I am dying!"—that adds to the film's spare setting and occasionally brutal worldview. It's not a perfect adaptation, but it does a better job of capturing Portis's unsentimental language than the earlier film.
True Grit makes a few mistakes along the way. Bridges's performance is a bit uneven—his Cogburn is less broken-down in some scenes than in others—and the score is unimaginative. But it's a story, an old-fashioned yarn, about two of the unlikeliest people thrown together by circumstance, and about the beauty that can grow out of the most barren soil. 
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I need to see it again. It was pretty good, but after one watching I rank it under their previous three films (A Serious Man, Burn After Reading, and No Country for Old Men). The falseness of the sky/horizon towards the end kinda bugged me. Maybe that whole look was intentionally cheezy though.
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My real measure of a film is how often I think about it after I've left the theater. True Grit has stuck with me like no other movie has since A Serious Man.
@6, I enjoyed Burn After Reading, but it's nowhere near as good as Miller's Crossing or The Man Who Wasn't There. Better than The Hudsucker Proxy and The Ladykillers, but not their best.
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And John Wayne never did seem tough to me. He's just a fat asshole in all his movies, hero or villain. I've never figured out how he got a reputation as the quintessential "tough cowboy" and got all those roles, and I guess I never will.
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@WeeblesWobble: Don't hate on The Hudsucker Proxy! That's a misunderstood movie if ever there was one.
Bridges was a cross between the guy from Crazy Heart and The Dude. He was a joke not gritty.
Also the ending was lazy.
It's a good family comedy but it could have been so much better. Save your money and rent it.
Nope. It's actually "Fargo" -- in this and in ALL instances.
And No Country For Old Men is unfuckingbeatable.
Cormac McCarthy ROCKS!
As do the Coen Boys.
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