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Screened in regular glorious non-stereoscopic film, the way they damn well shot it. Amen.

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61 years old, Jeff bridges is just now coming into his prime. He has lain at the level of underappreciation for ages - how he was robbed of an Oscar for The Fisher King continues to elude me - but something happened when this dude played the Dude, some twelve years ago. It didn't happen immediately; actually, it took half a decade or so, or right around the amount of time for people to start organizing Lebowskifests and cottoning to the fact that The Big Lebowski was one of the best, if not the best, movie the Coens had ever made. Suddenly, the wavefront of investment capital Bridges had carefully been sowing in film after film after film all came rolling back at him. An Oscar in March and extraordinary headline roles in Tron and True Grit within a week of one another in December, and we can finally say that Jeff Bridges has arrived.

And Bridges is exceptional in True Grit, no doubt, but this movie is owned body and soul by the precocious sweetheart the Coens found to play their Mattie Ross, Hailee Steinfeld. Where did this girl come from? As Mattie, Steinfeld gives one of the most assured breakout performances ever put to film, playing a 14-year-old girl who may also be one of the best female protagonists I've ever seen. She'd kick Hit Girl's ass, or at least talk her to death; Mattie spouts rivers of complex frontier babble with the Shakespearean precision of Al Swearenen, minus the Cs. When Mattie, abandoned by her bounty hunter hireling (Bridges) in a cruel joke, drives her horse headlong into a raging river to show who's boss, I wanted to stand up and cheer. Looking at once startlingly mature and alarmingly childlike, the camera eats Steinfeld alive, and she holds her ground - and in some cases even gains ground - against three or four of the best actors in the world. Zowie, a star is born.

There is none of the Coens' characteristic ironic distance, their counter-clockwise tweaking of the genre, at play in True Grit. This is a western, a damn good western, and a grand old tale. The directors seem to know it, and rejoice in it. In fact, for a film dealing with essentially grim subject matter - Mattie's stoic quest for revenge upon the man who shot her father, with Bridges as her guide - I reflected repeatedly at how much joy True Grit contains. The film is not flippant or lightheaded, but it enjoys itself to the utmost within the means provided by great characters and a great story.

Take the Matt Damon character. He is named, rather unfortunately, LaBoeuf, pronounced "LeBeef." (The Coens resisted the temptation to hire Shia himself, thank goodness.) Coming upon young Mattie, ill and in bed, LaBoeuf's first exchange with the girl marks him as doggedly creepy. But the Coens revolve the character neatly 180 degrees, to bring him to the point where he is the hero that is needed at precisely the moment such heroes are needed. In any other movie, LaBoeuf would start as a dark joke and just get darker; but the Coens aren't in this to take the piss out of anyone. Even berserk Marshall Cogburn, with Bridges growling at such a low timbre that half his lines are lost to bearlike incoherence, is given cinematic permission to make an ass of himself and be awesome. As a tonal line goes, the one in True Grit is nearly impossible to maintain, except by masters of their craft. All involved are.

Ultimately, what drives True Grit is the degree to which we simply enjoy spending time with all of these people, and Cogburn and Mattie especially, and Mattie herself particularly. It's a flawless pyramid of characterization driving towards a perfect warm fuzzy. There are dark deeds and adventure at play in True Grit, but if the movie were just three hours of Cogburn, Mattie and LaBoeuf sitting around the campfire shooting the shit and taking the piss, I'd still call it one of the best films of the year. But it's a bit more than that, pushing a winsome heroine through a careworn tale of maturation, right up to the moment where the euphoric joy spreads across her face as she stands at the top of her particular hill, and right before she pays a price for her learning.