True Grit

 SPOILER ALERT
******** I WILL MAINLY BE DISCUSSING THE ENDING*********
*DON"T READ THIS UNLESS YOU DON"T CARE WHAT HAPPENS*

True Grit is a good movie.  Beautifully filmed, superbly acted; a fine Western tale.  And yes, I would recommend seeing it.  In fact, I ask that you go see it, because then maybe you can explain the ending to me.

The story revolves around a 14 year old girl who hires a US Marshall to help her hunt down the man that murdered her father.  The resulting chase/journey is the meat of the movie, and I wouldn't dare give away how it unfolds.  But the very ending has left me wondering what the intention was.  I haven't seen the original, so perhpas this remake is only using what happened in the first movie, but that doesn't really make it any more logical.

You see, after the big climactic fight, the culmination of the hunt, where good guys and bad guys face off for the final time, the girl falls into a hole in the ground and gets bitten by a snake.  She must be rushed off to the doctor or whatever.  This is all fine and good, an emotional closing sentence to a brilliant story (with the exception of the drawn out focus on the poor horse being ridden to death, which I hated and felt gratuitous - I can't stand movies that torture animals).  But then we have this little coda, showing the girl 25 years later all grown up.  Again this would be just fine, showing us she survived and never married and how her life turned out.  Wrapping things up so to speak and giving the audience a little breath after the intense action and emotion of the ending before they have to leave the theater and find their cars.  But instead, it sends her on a little journey to visit the man who saved her, and then we find out he died 3 days before she got there.  So the entire coda is completely futile.  I just don't understand the purpose of this.  If they had just wanted us to know that the one guy died, couldn't that just have been said in voice over: "oh, I wanted to see Rooster again, but he died before I could get there."  Instead we see her heading to meet him, all interested in what he is doing know, and then it's all "oh, he died a few days ago."  Random letdown.  Instead of closure we are left with vague disappointment, which, following the brutality of the climax, results in quite the bummer ending.

Now, I'm not against a downer ending, per say, but it has to leave you with some sort of emotion or understanding you can take with you when you leave.  Having the final notes of the film just be futility is so unsatisfying and really weakens the movie in my opinion.  Instead of leaving exhilarated by the action and bolstered by the 'true grit' of the characters, I was just left confused and unfulfilled.  Which is a failure of movie making, in my opinion.

Still.  99% of the movie was great, and you should definitely see it, especially in light of all the award nominations sure to come.  But if you do see it, can you let me know why the ending was so deliberately lame?