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**** (out of ****) One of the best things about being a Southerner is that you're never required to speak in anything besides the most elliptical way possible. Roger Ebert was probably paraphrasing someone else when he summed up the Old West, and I'll paraphrase him: the land is so vast, so open, so formidable, that the men who explored it had to make giant personalities to fill that space, to challenge those mountains and open spaces. But Robert Ford (Casey Affleck, spellbinding) discovers that the space-filling personality attached to Jesse James (Brad Pitt) is not of Jesse's making, and has very little to do with the real Jesse. Ford has been for years intimate with the fabricated, larger-than-life Jesse of dime novels. But when he joins Jesse's gang and intimates himself into Jesse's life, he is slowly disillusioned to discover that Jesse is just a sociopath who likes dirty jokes. It's this realization that puts Ford on his titular course. (And we know it's based on real-life because two of Jesse's gang are named "Hite" and "Dick." Dick's last name is Liddle and Hite's father is Major Hite. Tee-hee.) Director-screenwriter Andrew Dominik is patient enough to follow subplots and side characters, including a feud between Hite and Dick when Dick seduces the Major's second wife. The resulting gunfight is delivered in a graceless panic, with twelve shots at close-range succeeding in nothing more than hits to the leg and hand. "The Assassination of Jesse James" is an unhurried film that runs well past two hours, with long stretches in the snowy winter as men in vests huddle inside wooden cabins where the floors creak whenever they walk. There's an omniscient narrator providing background throughout and I wonder if much of what he describes was originally filmed and then dropped to keep the runtime down. I can imagine director Dominik and his editors deciding to drop exposition scenes – how Jesse lost part of a finger, etc. – in favor of surreal, dreamy photography of chairs, households, and skies. Casey Affleck is a revelation, half-gay for Jesse and too brainy for his own good. Paul Schneider, the likable doofus from "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls," is equally in a brand new place as menacing Dick Liddle. The cinematography crosses the vistas and tumultuous skies of Malick's "Badlands" with the warped lenses and tinting of Sokurov's "Mother and Son." "Jesse James" looks sometimes gritty and realistic, and sometimes like faded daguerreotypes peeked at through a magnifying glass. The movie also makes a good case that it's high time for vests on men (or "waistcoats") to stage a comeback. Finished Friday, December 14th, 2007 Copyright © 2007, 2010 by Peter Kovic (aka Friday + Saturday Night Movie Critic) THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD **** (out of ****) Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepherd, Jeremy Renner, Michael Parks, Garrett Dillahunt, and Paul Schneider Directed + written for the screen by Andrew Dominik 2007 R |
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