True Grit
A posse of Coen actors casually creates one of the best westerns ever, providing The Dude with another character for the ages.
I wish I was skilled enough to create prose conveying the basic outline of the tall tale exposed here, in a manner conducing with the same style which the characters themselves yap in the film. Alas, it ain’t easy.
The framing device is just Mattie, the precocious little girl, being headstrong and stubborn at times, to avenge his father’s death, at the hands of an hired hand, robbing him of a mare and two California gold pieces. In the end, 25 years after this, she searches for and fails to reunite with her friends, on account of too many time has passed, basically. But their time together speaks for itself.
After her father being robbed of his life and the other aforementioned accoutrements, Mattie fetches his body and notices a lack of effort by the part of law enforcement types to pursue the case. Her revenge is very important, she is willing to pay 50 bucks for mere whereabouts of the runaway. Eventually, she pays twice that for tagging along with a US Marshall, some old fat drunk dude, formerly a bank robber and Confederate bushwhacker.
There’s a Texas ranger in pursuit of the same hardened criminal, for having killed a state senator over an argument about a dog. Some amount of friction is expended, on account of deciding where should he hang for its crimes. The Texans pay more, so that’s where he goes.
Mattie remains with Rooster all the way, but the ranger (who fought for the Union) quarrels with him almost right away and goes his separate way. Just as they are about to ambush the gang, the ranger shows up and gets lassoed and dragged around for a while, saved by Rooster in his perch, but the rest of the criminals get away scot free.
Searching a nearby silver mine yields nothing, the trail is now cold, so Rooster just gives up, badmouths the ranger a little more so he goes away, which means they are alone again.
By miracle, Mattie finds the criminal she was looking for, and even shoots him once, but she gets nabbed by the gang, while Rooster and the ranger ride to her aide. Rooster does a magnificent 4-on-1 horseback shootout (the stuff of legends), and gets saved by a longshot from the ranger, but the criminal awakes and whacks him. Mattie has to shoot her attacker, but falls into a pit and gets bitten by a rattlesnake.
The ranger is left behind, Rooster takes into the nearest doctor, goading and knifing the horse into exhaustion, then carries her manually even more. The survives, but her arm is cut off, and never sees any of them again.
25 years later, she schedules a final meeting with Rooster, but he keels over just a few days before she meets him. Bummer.
Rooster Cogburn is not just an incredible name, Jeff Bridges breaks out of the Dude-shaped pigeonhole, into another Rooster-shaped pigeonhole (see R.I.P.D.). Makes the DeLaurentiis’ King Kong to be a long-lost memory.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.