Twenty years ago, I thought of the Coen brothers as cheeky titans of upending genres. They started their mutual career with a crime film, a broad comedy and a gangster picture, each of them adhering to the tropes of their respective genres while also spinning them around like they’d been tossed in a turbine. Joel and Ethan Coen were obviously impeccable cinematic craftsmen, but they also laced just enough satirical meta-commentary into the work to make sure the finished efforts were held at a certain remove. Much as I love those films, they operate with a slight lack of conviction, a hint to the audience that the filmmakers might be a little above it all. That aspect of their art has almost entirely slipped away, and their new version of True Grit stands as the latest, strongest evidence of that fact. Not a remake of the 1969 film that won John Wayne an Oscar (though at least one scene pays direct tribute to that predecessor), but a fresh adaptation of the Charles Portis novel from a couple years earlier, Ethan and Joel Coen’s film is as sturdy and stolid as many of the classic Hollywood westerns churned out by studios when tales of weathered cowboys ruled the box office. The Coens embrace the classic narrative style with an inspiring confidence, generating the thrills in their film from beautifully constructed interplay between characters and an expert unfolding of the plot. They also create verbal pyrotechnics by adhering closely to the original dialogue penned by Portis in his book, a shrewdly mannered and buoyantly intelligence bundling of marvelous words that admittedly hews closely to the style the brothers have perfected across their fourteen previous films. The work of the performers is crucial to the effectiveness of that language, and the Coens have assembled a game cast, including Jeff Bridges, a paragon of muttered discomposure as Marshal Rooster Cogburn; Matt Damon, oozing comic vanity as Texas Ranger LaBoeuf; and the film’s largely unsung but completely vital actor, Dakin Matthews as the horse trader Colonel Stonehill. It’s his scene with actress Hailee Steinfeld, playing the headstrong teenage girl out to avenge her father, that establishes her unyielding, impenetrable authority. After watching her talk circles around Stonehill, I believed this girl could get anything she wanted and turn the most grizzled souls to her side. The Coens have said they cast Steinfeld from a pool of thousands of contenders largely because she could handle the difficult dialogue. That’s readily apparent, but she also imbues Mattie Ross with a forcefulness that’s pure and compelling. The Coens could have taken all sorts of eccentric liberties with their film and still made something entertaining. But by being as true as their heroine, they’ve made something that can stand with the revered classics of the form.