We learn this from her first scene, in which she, a fourteen-year-old girl with braided pigtails, arrives in a small Western town to retrieve the body of her murdered father. Mattie Ross, the heroine of the True Grit, is tough.
She chooses a little one with a lot of spunk who seems a lot like her. Its journey begins slightly hopefully, with a girl picking out the horse she will ride on the quest. But it doesn’t start out this way, entirely. It is a bleak, cynical, nihilistic film, about a grim journey. True Grit, the 2010 Coen Brothers film, has a slightly different attitude towards its horses, but this is because it has a slightly different attitude towards everyone, especially its cowboys. Horse deaths usually mark two things: that its rider has lost a critical tool for survival, as well as the tragedy that a creature so statuesque and powerful has been destroyed by petty human interference. And it’s jarring to see such a giant, muscular, balanced creature as a horse awkwardly tumble down. There’s usually a shriek, and a patter of horseshoes. It means a lot when a horse dies in a Western-and it’s always startling to watch.
In the Western, no figure is more vulnerable than the horse, particularly because eliminating the horse both incapacitates and exposes the cowboy, who is usually the real target.
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