Grit

The Homesman

Crit

It's impossible not to associate this riveting story of a frontier female defiant of the limitations on her sex, embarked on a sacred mission with the coerced assistance of a rough-about-the-edges, rough-through-and-through coot, with another story that fits the same description--would be impossible even if the recent incarnation of Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld, didn't show up in a small role near the end.

The film is unembarrassed by its debt to True Grit, employing key visual and thematic tropes, and its refusal to apologize makes the reliance easier to accept. Harder to accept are the independent assessments by two male gazes of a character played by Hilary Swank as "too plumb damn plain" and "plain as an old tin bucket," but even that works, because Swank's Mary Bee Cuddy, for all her protofeminist independence, knows she's plain, knows the rules, and, age thirty-one, pursues matrimony like the last berth on Noah's ark.

And in the end, it's not True Grit at all, but it is another dark, unpredictable tale on its own quest. This is the second big-screen feature Tommy Lee Jones has directed, each with a quest at the center, and I have no idea where he'll ask us to follow him next, but I'm there.