True grit _the dreadful path of the righteous

The heater has been stopped functioning in the screen 2 room, movie theater, up in Muswell Hill, but people did not care much and came to see True Grit. My English dictionary says that "grit" is coarse sand or small rough pebbles. In colloquial sense, it refers to "endurance, courage". Based on a novel by Charles Portis (1968), the first film adaptation is with John Wayne in 1969.

The ending is kind of rushy, the "bad guy" too irrelevant and there is too much talking, I would say. The religious driver of the movie is a single verse in the Book of Proverbs (28:1), "the wicked flee when none pursueth", and the religious chant is in essence all surrounding the story. The whole soundtrack sounds to me like variations of the first parts of Deep River. And I like that at the beginning: we must pay for everything in this life; only the amazing grace of God is free.

If you continue reading the first four verses of the Book of Proverbs, you find something more interesting, more suitable to the story:

"The wicked flee when no one is pursuing,
         But the righteous are bold as a lion.
By the transgression of a land many are its princes,
         But by a man of understanding and knowledge, so it endures".

The movie is about the terrible, burdensome life of the righteous pushing through death. Everything around the young girl is death and its marks and scars. Her hand turned black after the snake bite and after all she has to live through with that mark, as the Marshall did accordingly with one gone-off eye. Black is the color of a lady in fight with death and devastation of the heart. Alcohol is the man's companion through this valley of tears. Pain and suffering and wrong awaits for him who is right (blood and dragging to the second Marshall, for instance).

Again, death is around the little girl: his father's killing, the identification of his body, all the coffins, the hung men in public execution, the Indian boys killing the donkey, the dead body hung from a tall tree and the black bird feeding out of his eyes, the killings in the cottage, the fighting outside the cottage, the three bodies abandoned leaning against the cottage while the Marshall is drunk as hell. Death dances around the girl when left alone with her father's killers, and then when she falls in the den and from the skeleton and bones of a dead man, deadly snakes come out. Marshall saves his life and during the rest of the day and all through the night, riding on top of a black horse, they both struggle to beat death and bring her into life. Death took the horse and her hand. Death made her an eternal miss, fated to be despised and mistreated. All worn in black, she stands alone next to only few graves... In one of them the Marshall lies, just a little piece of light in the dark, devastated desert. She was not taken across the river once and only the Marshall took her into his arms and body and across the country.

And so is the path of the righteous.

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