40-Year-Old Mattie: 
 
 (first lines) People do not give it credence that a young girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to average to her father's blood. But it did happen. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down and robbed him of his life and his horse and two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Chaney was a hired man and Papa had taken him up to Fort Smith to help lead back a string of Mustang ponies he'd bought. In town, Chaney had fallen to drink and cards and lost all his money. He got it into his head he was bein' cheated and went back to the boardin' house for his Henry rifle. When Papa tried intervene, Chaney shot him. Chaney fled. He could have walked his horse, for not a soul in that city could not be bothered to give chase. No doubt Chaney fancied himself scot-free. But he was wrong. You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another. There is nothin' free, except the grace of God. ||||| That old-time American religion of vengeance runs like a river through “True Grit,” a comic-serious tale about some nasty, brutish times. Beautifully adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from the parodic western novel by Charles Portis, it turns on a 14-year-old Arkansas girl who hires a “one-eyed fat man” to hunt down her father’s killer. First published in 1968, Mr. Portis’s tall tale was brought to the screen the next year custom-fitted for John Wayne , who rode the role of that fat man, Rooster Cogburn, straight to an Oscar. Now it’s the thinner scene-stealer Jeff Bridges who sits and sometimes drunkenly slumps in the saddle. 
 
 Much as he did in the raucously entertaining original film directed by Henry Hathaway, Rooster enters on his best behavior, seated in a courtroom amid a fog of cigar smoke and conspicuous lies. The pale, ghostly light comes courtesy of the Coens’ frequent cinematographer, Roger Deakins, while many of the twisty, funny sentences have been plucked by the filmmakers right from the novel. A deputy United States marshal, Rooster has attracted the interest of Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld, in a terrific film debut), a half-pint who, with her bloodlust and severely braided hair, is an authentic American Gothic. As she listens to Rooster recount his bloody deeds and high body count, her eyes shine with a true believer’s excitement. 
 
 Avenging her father and keeping close track of her family’s expenses are what preoccupy Mattie, a richly conceived and written eccentric, as memorable on the page as she is now on screen. Softened for the first film (in which she was played by a 21-year-old Kim Darby, in a bob), she has been toughed up again by the Coens so that she resembles the seemingly humorless if often unintentionally humorous Scripture-quoting martinet of Mr. Portis’s imagination. At times she brings to mind D. H. Lawrence’s famed formulation that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.” At other times, as when she wears her dead father’s oversize coat and hat, she looks like a foolish child left to perilous play. 
 
 Those dangers are telegraphed early by the public hanging that occurs soon after the story opens. Mattie, along with a family worker, Yarnell (Roy Lee Jones), has traveled from her Yell County home to Fort Smith, Ark., to identify her father, who has been gunned down by another worker, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). After doing so, she sends Yarnell home and gets down to business, first by settling her father’s accounts. She then hires Rooster because she hears that he has “true grit,” a quality that mostly seems to entail a disregard for preserving the lives of his prisoners. It’s no wonder she watches the hanging with such avidity, and no wonder too that she takes off after Chaney, armed with Rooster and her father’s heavy gun. 
 
 Their journey leads them into Indian country (with few Indians) and increasingly tense and violent encounters featuring corpses, severed fingers and a bad, bad man (Barry Pepper, spewing fear and spittle). On occasion a Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who calls himself LaBeef, joins in the search. Wearing jangling spurs and a luxurious mustache that sits on his lip like a spoiled Persian cat, LaBoeuf hopes to bag Chaney for a large reward. Dead or alive, everyone in this story — snaggletooth thief or boardinghouse owner — has a price either on his head or in mind, usually in the form of the dollars and cents one person hopes to extract from another. “Why do you think I am paying you,” Mattie asks Rooster, “if not to have my way?” ||||| The turning point in Tony Kaye's new movie, "Detachment" -- which, despite many nameable flaws, is a wrenching and powerful achievement -- comes when Lucy Liu, playing a high school guidance counselor, suffers a major breakdown in front of a student. It's easy to be callous, she shrieks at the bored and bewildered girl in front of her, easy not to give a shit. What takes courage is actually caring about yourself and the world. Sure, you can call that a hackneyed sentiment, and some people won't get past the fact that "Detachment" is delivering a familiar message in a familiar setting. But two things redeem the scene, at least for me: 1) What Liu says is absolutely true, and it is one of the central problems in contemporary life, and 2) she's not saying it from some position of cool, removed wisdom; she's pissed off, filled with rage, and completely losing her shit at a girl whose only crime was announcing that she doesn't care about school and wants to be a model. 
 
 "Detachment" might be the biggest conversation piece I've seen so far at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. It's a scattershot, melodramatic would-be epic set in and around a New York high school, with a tremendous cast headed by Oscar-winner Adrien Brody as a substitute teacher struggling with his own barren emotional life. (It also stars Christina Hendricks of "Mad Men," James Caan, Marcia Gay Harden, Blythe Danner and Liu.) It's an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink kind of movie with a Fellini level of ambition. Kaye blends animated sequences along with dreams, memories and fantasies, mini-interviews with real-life teachers, dogmatic lectures about the failings of our society, and quotations from Albert Camus and Edgar Allan Poe. Carl Lund's screenplay hits a lot of flat notes and the acting is uneven, but ultimately I didn't much care -- I was swept along by the spectacular visual journey and the wrenching emotional experience. People will either love "Detachment" or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public. 
 
 If you've heard of Kaye at all, it's almost certainly because of his 1998 debut feature "American History X," which is now a revered cult film but was a historic flop on its initial release, plagued by an entertaining and highly public three-way feud between Kaye, star Edward Norton Jr. and distributor New Line Cinema. Kaye tried to get his name taken off the film and replaced with the credit "Humpty Dumpty" (even threatening to legally change his name to that effect). He reportedly suggested -- after the film was shot, edited and in the can -- commissioning a new script from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott and starting over again from scratch. 
 
 Indeed, once you start with the Tony Kaye stories, you don't want to stop. He spent $100,000 of his own money on ads in the Hollywood trade papers abusing Norton and the film's producers, which I guess echoes the time when -- as a nearly unknown advertising director -- he bought an ad in a London broadsheet announcing that "Tony Kaye Is the Greatest English Director Since Hitchcock." He once shot more film for a 30-second Volvo commercial than Woody Allen had used in making "Hannah and Her Sisters." At the peak of his advertising success in the mid-'90s, he used to buy one of every item in the seasonal Comme des Garçons catalog. As he told a British interviewer a few years ago, "I did a lot of very insane things. A lot of very, very, very insane things." 
 
 With his filmmaking career in ruins after the "American History X" debacle, Kaye briefly came under the wing of Marlon Brando, who hired him to film a series of seminars Brando was leading with Michael Jackson, Sean Penn and Jon Voight. (Of all the unfinished Kaye projects, that one may be the strangest.) But Kaye's penchant for showing up at Los Angeles nightclubs dressed as Osama bin Laden -- in the fall of 2001 -- succeeded in alienating even the legendarily antisocial Brando, who died before the two could manage any reconciliation. So began Kaye's period in the outer wilderness of the entertainment industry, before he began to work his way back by actually completing his memorably gruesome 2007 abortion documentary "Lake of Fire," most of which had been shot during the Clinton administration. 
 
 I'm not Tony Kaye's shrink and I'm not sure it's worth speculating about why he did all the crazy things he did; when I interviewed him at the time "Lake of Fire" was released, he explained it all as a kind of act, in emulation of idols like Erich von Stroheim or Francis Ford Coppola. "All the work of the directors I really liked," he said, "those directors seemed to be tyrannical, egotistical, arrogant, mad. They were my gods, so I thought, 'Well, I'd better be like that.' I'm not really like that." That sounds like clear-sighted rearview analysis, but I'm not sure it's adequate. When I ran into Kaye the other day in the Tribeca press room, I didn't recognize him. When we met in 2007 he was bald, but he now has a Rasputin beard and non-haircut, and was approaching journalists with a hand-lettered paper sign that read, "I HAVE A SPEECH PROBLEM. MY NAME IS TONY KAYE ('American History X'). I WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT MY MOVIE 'DETACHMENT.'" (Kaye did have a speech impediment in childhood and says he avoids talking on the phone, but you'd never notice it in ordinary conversation.) 
 
 Yes, it would be great if we could talk about "Detachment," because the other side of the Tony Kaye story is that he's such an intriguing and irresistible character that he throws his own movies into the shade, and that's not serving his interests or anybody else's. The thing is, in announcing himself as the greatest English director since Hitchcock back in 1980-whatever, Kaye was being an arrogant jackass, but his insight into his own potential wasn't necessarily wrong. In some alternate universe a few ticks away from ours, things went a little differently before or during or after "American History X" and Kaye is now widely seen as one of the greatest living filmmakers, along with Scorsese and the Coens and Darren Aronofsky and whomever else you'd like to nominate. 
 
 But that universe isn't this one, and it's anybody's guess how much of a comeback Tony Kaye can mount at age 58, with the manner of a 19th-century European anarchist and a heavily allegorical high school drama that's going to sound, the more I describe it to you, like about seven (or 17) other movies you've already seen. It's got a terrific central performance from Brody, maybe his best since "The Pianist," but many of the other elements -- the sympathetic fellow teacher he starts dating (Hendricks), the hardass but well-meaning principal (Harden), the teen hooker he adopts off the street (newcomer Sami Gayle) -- seem like stock archetypes, at least until you actually sit down and watch the film. 
 
 Some distributor is going to have to take a chance on "Detachment" and endure a certain amount of critical derision. It's probably worth it, partly because Tony Kaye still has cinematic talent to burn, but even more because of what he can do with it, even in a highly imperfect movie that uses the pointless but noble struggle of high school to stand in for lots of other pointless and noble forms of struggle, like making movies and being alive. What I take away from Tony Kaye's struggle is that he may have been a difficult personality -- and may still be one -- and expended way too much energy early in his career on behaving like an asshole, but he has never, ever, surrendered to cynicism or callousness. He cares passionately and prodigiously about everything he's ever done, arguably too much. If he has thrown away a once-promising career as a result, then his failure is better than most people's success. ||||| True Grit 
 
 'True Grit' review: Coen brothers' reboot is a wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western 
 
 Sebastian/AP Jeff Bridges and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld star in Joel and Ethan Coen's 'True Grit.' 
 
 A one-eyed marshal helps a girl find her father"s killer. With Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon. Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen (1:50). PG-13: Violence. At area theaters. 
 
 
 
 Joel and Ethan Coen are rare cinematic originals, which masks how carefully distilled their films are. No matter the source — gangster noirs, cultural footnotes, Homeric journeys, Looney Tunes — they bolster new ideas with classic structure, and make the seasoned seem fresh. 
 
 
 
 Their latest, "True Grit," adapted religiously from Charles Portis' 1968 pulp novel, is a wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western drama that lets the quirks of the genre gallop freely as it keeps a tight rein throughout. 
 
 
 
 John Wayne won an Oscar for his own version of quirky in the 1969 original, as U.S. Marshal Reuben (Rooster) Cogburn, a drunkard who called a mangy cat his relative and wore an eyepatch. 
 
 
 
 In the Coens' fable of 1870s retribution, Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) is not a sideshow but a serious man. When 14-year-old Mattie Ross (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) hires him to find her father's killer, Cogburn heads with her from Arkansas to the Indian territory that would one day be Oklahoma. For part of the way, a preening Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (Matt Damon) rides with them. 
 
 
 
 Their adventure brings them to Chaney (Josh Brolin) and a scarred thug named Lucky Ned (Barry Pepper). The story builds slowly and is filled with character, and the Coens and their longtime cinematographer, Roger Deakins, make every run-in and frontier snowfall feel haunted and poetic. 
 
 
 
 Damon is sly and Steinfeld is sturdy, yet the big question for most viewers — does Bridges sit tall in Wayne's saddle? — is really like comparing a rifle and a six-shooter. 
 
 
 
 The onetime Big Lebowski is always a delight and lets Rooster reveal himself to be (a bit) softer at first, until he slowly pulls out the toughness. (Wayne, the same age in the first movie as Bridges is now, did it flinty, then tender.) 
 
 
 
 Bridges has moments in which Rooster's croaky monologues are as full of nuance as the one eye he's left to work with. His sole peeper darts around, closes in exhaustion and earns our affection, while "True Grit" proves to be as funny and heroic as any other legend, and tells an expert tale to boot. 
 
 
 
 jneumaier@nydailynews.com
– True Grit, the Coen brothers’ latest, updates a John Wayne classic—though it may stick closer to the original novel than the first film. Critics are impressed, with the Rotten Tomatoes score currently at 95%: In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis applauds the film’s 13-year-old star, Hailee Steinfeld, who gives a “memorably ferocious performance” as a “character whose single-minded pursuit of vengeance has unmistakable resonance.” The film is “a winning western with just a few dark eddies beneath the surface, one that features a star-making lead performance and some spectacular photography,” writes Andrew O’Hehir in Salon. Still, it “falls just short of being great.” Writing in the New York Daily News, Joe Neumaier calls the movie a “wonderfully entertaining, beautiful Western drama that lets the quirks of the genre gallop freely as it keeps a tight rein throughout.”