Reel Politique: Movie Review, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the Barry Lyndon of Westerns. This isn’t praise, it is merely description. The film employs a narrator, whose text probably comes from the Ron Hansen source novel, who continually spoils what you are about to see. Spoil-phobic internet movie site visitors will be thrown into a tizzy over this, but the trick’s ancestry is noble.
This Western is directed by Andrew Dominik, otherwise known for the crime portrait Chopper, which introduced Americans to Eric Bana. So his key directorial strength appears to be eliciting good performances from drop-dead gorgeous males. He has a wealth of them in Coward, including Brad Pitt and Sam Shepard as Jesse and Frank James. But Dominik doesn’t skimp on the odd-looking thespian. Sam Rockwell and Casey Affleck are also in the film, as the brothers Ford. It’s interesting to compare this 160-minute film to Samuel Fuller’s tight, efficient I Shot Jesse James, which just came out on DVD, and which it resembles in a couple of ways, but not enough. Fuller’s film is a fantasia on the theme of friendship; Dominik’s is a brooding, moody ’70s anti-Western, eager to show you how life really was. For example, there is an excellently staged scene, an intimate shoot out in a bedroom, where you can almost smell the stink of the revolvers’ discharges. The pain is palpable. On the other hand, the film is too enamored of its own prestige; DP Roger Deakins goes in for long-held shots of various men on horseback slowly riding across the Kansas prairie toward yet another isolated farm house.
Fuller didn’t like Jesse James. From his research he concluded that James was an odoriferous, predatory bisexual with a mean streak. But he left all that out of his film. He was more interested in Ford, a man who admired James, but who nullified that admiration by killing him for a bounty. Brad Pitt plays James as an unlikable, closed-in man. But he is essentially almost invisible in the film. He also doesn’t listen to the narrator, who says that James suffered from a disease that made him over-blink. Pitt hardly blinks at all.
Coward was shot two years ago and is only now coming to the screen. Aside from the fact that it looks boring, like Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp movie, Coward also has the seeming deficit of casting Casey Affleck as Bob Ford. But as we’ve seen from the simultaneously release Gone Baby Gone, he can be effective when used right. Here his callowness serves the dimensions of the character. Note the scene when he sneaks up on Frank James and tries to weasel his way into the gang. Here, and throughout the film, his line readings are unpredictable but most apt. But as Joe Bob Briggs says, there is way too much plot here getting in the way of the story, and after three hours you wonder why there where so many side trips down unproductive plot paths, such as a visit some gang members make to a relative in Kentucky. Fuller was more interested in the social and psychological after-effects of Ford’s killing of James, but in Dominik’s approach it only takes up a few minutes. His concluding suite of images is effective, but too little way too late.