Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross.

Unlike the two female characters just noted, Mattie Ross begins her story with that standard of the Western genre, a moral mission.  Grown-up Mattie’s voice-over relates a tragedy without quavering.  Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), a halfwit outlaw Mattie’s father tried to help, murdered him and fled to the Choctaw Nation.  No one from town pursued him.  The sheriff merely chalked Chaney’s name onto a sprawling list of fugitives.  Mattie’s mother was too weak to put any of the family’s affairs in order.  Mattie depicts her mother as a woman who can “hardly spell cat,” not to mention being “hobbled by grief,” hesitant, and bad at math.  Frank Ross’s murder would have caused hardly a ripple had not his daughter strutted into Fort Smith.

As Mattie barters and reasons, inciting sloths to action and misers to justice, Steinfeld’s performance shows a naïve, honest face trying on adult resolve. Just like she rolls up the sleeves of her father’s wool suit and wears it jauntily, she also wears a resolve she’ll soon grow into more fully.  Yet the resolve she shows from the film’s beginning is nothing to trifle with.  She talks quickly and firmly, looks adults in the eye, knows the law, and drives a hard bargain.  She doesn’t reciprocate when women hug her or consent to have women fuss over her.  Mattie doesn’t flout nineteenth century feminine conventions so much as she just can’t be bothered with them.  Her moral mission is primary; nothing, especially not other people’s expectations, must bar her way.  And thus, she’s known as “a harpy in trousers” who gives “very little sugar with [her] pronouncements,” and has admirable “sand.”

Mattie thinks she’s an able match for the mission conferred on her.  She has the larger-than-life feelings of an adolescent without the discernment experience brings.  She compares a search for a murderer to a coon hunt at which all the campers tell ghost stories.  When she employs the meanest U.S. Marshal–Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges)– to chase Tom Chaney down, Mattie figures that his meanness means he has grit and that their mutual bravery makes them equals.

But when the story hits its three-quarter mark, the hunt fits Texas Ranger LaBoeuf’s (Matt Damon) assessment precisely: it’s gone from “manhunt” to “debauch.”  If Rooster fits Mattie’s ideal of a man with true grit, what’s he doing sloshing liquor?  Slumping nearly out of his saddle?  Firing a pistol at cornbread?  (Jeff Bridges is fantastic here, becoming even more of a lowlife than The Dude).  Mattie tells LaBoeuf, “I picked the wrong man.”

And so it would seem, except that Carter Burwell’s soundtrack keeps playing that redemptive refrain, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  Perhaps something more than Mattie’s own arms sustain her.  “The author of all things watches over me,” she says as she rides off on her mission.  In True Grit, the author of all things works through friendship, through people who can’t quite forget each other.

Around this three-quarter mark, questions of character development rather than the moral mission’s resolution became central to me.  Mary Pipher’s conclusion in Reviving Ophelia is not just that prepubescent girls have grit, but that societal pressure and hormonal upheaval chop vibrant young women into fragmented selves– the socially acceptable woman and the real self.  Pipher quotes Diderot, who said of women, “You all die at 15.”  So the question I wanted answered as I watched Cogburn, Ross, and sometimes LaBoeuf press on across the snowy plains was not will they catch Tom Chaney but will Mattie ‘die’ at 15? Will she become “hobbled” like her mother?

Kathleen Norris writes that “all too often… we find that our journey from girlhood to womanhood is an exile to an ‘alien soil.’”  Norris compares reaching womanhood with the Israelite captivity; women are asked to sing songs and appear happy in a land not their own.  Adult Mattie Ross will find herself on a turf where men rule and act and vote.  I wondered, will she outlast this pressure?

Without giving too much away, I will say it’s unsettling that there’s something witch-like in the closing shot of aged Mattie heading, alone, toward the horizon.  Her silhouette’s a bit like Miss Gulch‘s in the Wizard of Oz.  Her closing narration wrangles with people’s assessments of her, which must have gathered force throughout her life.  “Isn’t she a cranky old maid?” Mattie says people say about her.  In the novel, Charles Portis goes further and Mattie’s closing lines continue, “People love to talk.  They love to slander you if you have any substance.”   Thus, the final shot makes me think Mattie became one of many women slandered for being strong; I grieve because of the unjust loneliness of an outspoken woman.

Warning: here may be a few spoilers.

I recently read No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. A few nights later, I thought I should rewatch No Country for Old Men, to compare the book and the movie and re-grasp the plot, which was fuzzy in the book since I always lost track of where Llewellyn had last hidden the $2 million he had filched from dead drug dealers, and who exactly was after him and who was after the people who were after him.

Exactly five minutes and 27 seconds into No Country for Old Men – after the second brutal murder and right about when Llewellyn is ready to murder an innocent deer – I remembered I hated this movie. I do not enjoy seeing people getting holes neatly blown in their heads by a homicidal maniac with a terrible haircut! Reading the book was squirmy enough. Why did I want to relive this experience?

So I switched. To Made of Honor. Five minutes into it, Tom (Patrick Dempsey) – dressed as Bill Clinton – gets maced with perfume by a girl who will subsequently become his BFF and ask him to be her maid of honor, after he discovers he’s madly in love with her. This is more my type of movie. (It stars, after all, not one but two Grey’s Anatomy actors.)

I picked Made of Honor not just for the stunningly witty pun in its title but because I wanted to see an “emotional retard” get severely punished. This is what happens in the original, My Best Friend’s Wedding, when Julia Roberts loses the love of her life because she is a puerile brat. It would be good to see the same happen to the infantile Tom. I reflected – and I should know, because I am a romantic comedy expert – that this actually rarely happens in movies. Most of the time, in the alternative reality romantic comedy world, things work out for the brats and their dreams come true if they can just effect a change of heart.

But about two thirds into it, I got squirmy again. Something was not quite right. I began to remember hearing that Made of Honor didn’t end quite like the original My Best Friend’s Wedding. By the time Tom had filched a Scottish horse and was galloping headlong through the Scottish moor into a church door to tell the love of his life, “I love you” after only having the emotional maturity to say “I love you” to dogs, I was cursing the cruel caprice of the romantic comedy gods. I was outraged. I felt that my sense of justice had been shot like a lamb and minced up like the haggis Patrick Dempsey had served at his best friend’s bridal shower.

I had seen enough. I now felt like watching people get holes blown in their head by a serial killer with a terrible haircut, so I once again turned to No Country for Old Men.

Thirty minutes in, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has killed four people and would have killed six if not for a toilet flush and coin toss. I had no better grasp of the plot, and the moustaches bothered me very much. I lost track of the murders because I closed my eyes too much. I missed the book’s gentle, troubled inner musings of the sheriff and the way his humanity relieved the brutality.

In the end, Anton shoots his last victim – although, as she notes, he doesn’t have to – steps out on the front porch, checks his boots for her blood, and drives away. There’s a moment where we think that after all this, he’ll get caught. But he walks free.

In the end of Made of Honor, Tom weds his bride atop a skyscraper. In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh gets to waltz off into the sunset with a bone sticking out of his arm. In both our sense of justice is assaulted.

The oddity is that both of them – while Tom’s badness is so much more feeble – are alike in one respect. One character says of Anton, “You might even say he has principles,” just as Tom has untransgressable “rules.” The rules are absurd: Anton thinks that flipping a coin is a fair way to determine whether he will blow someone’s head in and that it would be terribly wrong not to let them call heads or tails on their own. Whereas Tom doesn’t see women two days in a row or say “I love you” to non-canine creatures. “It’s just shocking how you use it as a shield!” exclaims his prescient future love interest. Yes, it is shocking! Shocking that both the serial heartcrusher and serial killer use “rules,” in a twisted way, to justify their sociopathic inability to fathom others’ pain.

But Tom’s happy ending is less realistic than Anton’s. Anton’s ending depends on chance – like the flip of a coin – on forces outside himself. Had he not crashed his car, had the ambulance come just a bit earlier, had the boy not given Anton his shirt for a sling, things might have ended differently. Anton might have come to justice. We can wrap our minds around that: chance can let a guilty man go free.

We can also understand chance thwarting romance. But this isn’t the case with Tom. Tom should have an unhappy ending because his ending doesn’t depend on chance – it depends on his own emotional maturity. His emotional retardation – his too-recent inability to commit to another person for longer than, oh, two days – should make that skyscraper fairytale impossible. Anton’s ending depends on chance, but Tom’s ending should depend on his will – and call me a Calvinist, but his will, which until now has been tyrannized by his childishness, is too feeble to commit.

But the universe is not always just, I suppose. Sometimes the serial killer gets lucky and the serial heart-pulverizer goes free. Sometimes the fat bridesmaid who hubristically squeezed herself into a size 8 receives her due reward when her bridesmaid dress splits. But sometimes all the groomsmen happen to wear kilts and are able to supply massive safety pins to close up the tear. The caprice of the rom com gods causes it to rain on the just and the unjust – and makes the sun shine, too.