You won't go wrong with the Coen brothers, and this is another good one. It's been a frequent subject of redaction criticism, since it's based on a novel (by Charles Portis, published in 1968, bearing the same title) that was in 1969 made into a film of the same name, starring none other than John Wayne. I know nothing of the novel or the earlier movie but am going to guess that the Coens' version is bleaker and more desolating. It features Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Jeff Bridges, who was nominated for an Oscar, but the movie really belongs to Hailee Steinfeld, a teen-ager who plays the teen-aged Mattie Ross, who's determined to avenge the murder of her father. The movie plays up her intelligence, her linguistic prowess (in general, the characters in this movie never have to punish themselves with the thought, I wish I had said that, because they did), her precocious negotiating skills, her ability to climb trees and cut down corpses hanging from high branches, her devotion to her cause, her. . . grit.
In the end, though, what does it get her? Before she was fifteen, she tracked down her father's murderer in Indian country and shot him in the chest. Twenty-five years later, in the closing frame, she's a grave spinster with an amputated arm who's three days late to a Wild West show. Suddenly it makes more sense that in this movie it seems always to be night and you have to squint in the darkness to try and tell what unpleasant events are occurring.
