This is a really, really good movie. Bridges is excellent - completely different interpretation of Cogburn from Wayne's, but excellent and believable. Steinfeld is a wonderful actress and hopefully has a great future ahead of her. She is much better than Darby, who was too old and too modern. Steinfeld really digs into the part and steals the show - and since the book was about her and not Cogburn, that makes sense.
And thank goodness Glenn Campbell was nowhere near this production!
Things I noted particularly -- the courtroom scene is perfect. As a lawyer I usually hate courtroom scenes, but this one was just about right. A country courtroom in rural Georgia would have just about the same cast of characters in it today, asking the same questions, raising the same objections (I beat the prosecutor to "Dying declaration" which is exactly the correct exception to the hearsay rule), and dealing the same way with an obstreperous witness (about the only way a defense attorney can deal with a crusty old LE officer is p*$$ him off and make him look bad to the jury - the defense attorney tried hard here, but we never get to hear the verdict so no idea if he succeeded.)
The dialogue is right on the money. Believe it or not, people really talked this way back then. A young lady who was educated by her father in the Classics and the Larger Catechism would talk just so. Rhetoric and debate were taught in school, and flowery language was the order of the day. I edited my gg-grandfather's Civil War letters and he wrote like this, even when he was just scribbling a line to his wife.
The nuts-and-bolts of the film are perfect - great lighting, great score. I could quibble and point out that "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" wasn't written until 1887, ten years later, but it's a perfect theme for the film so whatever.
Little bit of trivia: "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" also figures in Night of the Hunter, where it's more or less the theme music for Robert Mitchum's nasty serial killer/preacher. Great scene - the inimitable Lillian Gish is sitting in a rocking chair, guarding the kids with a shotgun in her lap from the preacher lurking outside, and he starts singing -- and she starts singing along.
Leaning on the Everlasting Arms
Bet the Coen brothers saw that movie.
That movie scared me to death! It was more frightening than any monster movie. Monsters were fictional, but human monsters were all too real.