- Photos:
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- Running time:
- 160 minutes
- Rated:
- R
- Cast:
- Brad Pitt -
- Jesse James
- Casey Affleck -
- Robert Ford
- Sam Shepard -
- Frank James
- Mary-Louise Parker -
- Zee James
- Paul Schneider -
- Dick Liddil
(13 ratings)
3 1/2 stars (out of four)
“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” will drive a lot of people to distraction, if they’re even attracted to it in the first place. A meditation on celebrity, 19th Century frontier fan boys and the myths America feeds to its young, this superbly realized adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel runs about 160 minutes, and while there aren’t many individual acts of violence, they are painful and, more importantly, carry a moral consequence.
The film does not concern itself with finding ways to get a mainstream audience rooting for the characters, or against them. It is a film, often breathtaking without settling for being pretty, filled with nervous silence. Scan the past century’s worth of commercially popular westerns, and nervous silence is not a key ingredient in the films on that list. Yet for some people (I’m one) this melancholy magic act is well worth their time.
The New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Dominik has created a film soaked in strange interactions and portents of doom. It is full of longing for the past and a longing to make us see past our nostalgia. Brad Pitt, one of the producers, plays the feared and emulated A-list pop culture icon, the one who dies at the hands of his sidekick, young Bob Ford, played by Casey Affleck. Affleck is superb. His foggy-headed smiles and cold stares have a way of making Ford seem like the most cretinous yet most alert person in any given room.
Ford is a young pup in a stovepipe hat, not quite out of his teens when he meets Jesse and his brother Frank (Sam Shepard, who could not be better) just before the infamous Blue Cut train robbery of 1881. The way Dominik and his brilliant designers re-create this robbery, you feel you are there, a fly on the wall of history. This may be the most unassuming but exquisite period re-creation in a Hollywood film since “The Godfather Part II.”
Ford, his foggy head full of nickel-book paeans to his outlaw hero, becomes Jesse James’ sidekick. But the James ballad is already nearly sung. As the gang and its associates dissolves into fractious paranoia and vengeful bloodshed, and Jesse’s paranoia becomes more and more justified, “The Assassination of Jesse James” focuses on the two-headed creature at its core.
There is, I think, something missing in Pitt’s performance and in the way Dominik has chosen to depict James, which is softer than Hansen’s version. The rhythm of this beautiful picture, contemplative and wary, is not helped by Pitt, who works hard and honorably but also a bit sluggishly. The film needs more of a sociopathic hotfoot at its center. Yet this is not as much of a problem as one would think.
Roger Deakins is the cinematographer, and between this film and the forthcoming Coen brothers picture “No Country For Old Men,” an Academy Award should be a cinch. More importantly, it’s just about as fine and supple an example of cinematic lighting as can be found on a screen these days.
Dominik’s previous feature was the stylish but rather hollow true-crime picture “Chopper.” “The Assassination of Jesse James” heralds a major director on the rise. He risks pretentiousness at every step: He’s a big fan of speeded-up scudding clouds and waving wheat (borrowed from Terrence Malick and Ridley Scott), and while the musical score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is one of the year’s best, it does resort to a lugubrious cello theme once too often. But watch how Dominik and Deakins and the designers evoke a simple 1880s Kansas City street scene. As the unseen narrator tells us of Jesse’s saloon jaunts (shot in misty shadow, in Winnipeg; the entire film was shot in Canada), the stereopticon-slide effects—blurry at the edges, clearer in the middle—present an image of the past so persuasive, you cannot quite believe what you are seeing.
When Samuel Fuller made “I Shot Jesse James” in 1949 he created an unsettling dynamic between Ford and his hero, though the romantic fabrications involving The Woman That Loved Them Both were pure programmer blather. (The film did, however, end with a tantalizing question mark: Its final line, spoken by a dying Ford, was: “I’m sorry fer what I done to Jess. I ... loved him.”) Dominik re-creates a couple of key scenes from “I Shot Jesse James,” including the scene where Ford, a pariah following his state-sanctioned and state-rewarded murder of Jesse, listens in a saloon to a balladeer’s ode to the bravest gunman of them all. Scenes such as these appear to have been lifted directly from an old daguerreotype.
The film, like Hansen’s novel, exists in a realm of florid invention, imagining outlaws who say things like: “You can hide things in vocabulary.” That line is spoken by Dick Liddil, as played by the excellent and roguish Paul Schneider. He is one of many wormy supporting characters who come to life in the film. Quite apart from the tone and the rhythm of the piece, there are some narrative vagaries: One close-quarters shootout in an attic bedroom isn’t quite set up properly; you’re not sure why these fellows are killing each other. But like Pitt’s actorly limitations, such moments of fuzziness cannot mar the oddest major studio release of the year, and one of the most admirable.
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Movie theaters and showtimes for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in Chicago.
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