This is a Western? It seemed to me to be two and a half hours of Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt staring at each other. I thought I'd picked the film out of the wrong section of the DVD store. I really wanted to like this film, and to be completely honest, there are a ton of great performances here. Jeremy Renner, Sam Rockwell, and Sam Shepard all shine in supporting roles, but with the possible exception of Rockwell none of them are given enough time to fully develop their characters. Zooey Deschanel seems like a cruel, sexy afterthought thrown into the film for the heterosexual male audience who likely are a little uneasy two hours into the film by the thick sexual tension between Ford and James. I mean, I'm not a Freudian or anything, but the scene with James in the bathtub? More than a little suggestive that something more than hero worship is going on in Ford's head.
Affleck and Pitt are superb, but only when they aren't simply gazing into each other's eyes...which has to be roughly 50% of the film. I mean, Affleck stared into the camera so intently I thought he wanted to kill me by the end of it. The first two hours of the film, consequently, stand as a sickeningly melodramatic foreplay for the aesthetic and intellectual feast that occurs in the film's final 30 minutes. The most interesting part of the movie occurs once James is dead. The psychological toll the assassination has on the Ford brothers is infinitely more interesting than James' descent into madness.
I was also a bit off-put by the past-tense third-person narration present in the film. The only reason I can figure the director decided on this approach was to constantly remind his audience that this re-telling of the story must be digested by an audience removed from the Romanticism of James that was present following his assassination. At the same time, however, Dominik goes out of the way to establish this presentation of James. In the scene where James reveals he has killed Ed Miller to Charley Ford, James insists that Ford should "pity him" as well. By the end of the film, it's difficult not to. The cold, passionate voice of the narrator simply seems out of place. Though I loved the decision of how to shoot the final moments of the film. If it had ended any other way, I would have been more upset than I am.
As it stands, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not the sum of its spectacular parts. The film drags as an art-house investigation of a time period that simply isn't conducive to that kind of treatment. One gets the feeling that the story being told on screen isn't the truth, but simply another one of Ford's stage shows with overly temperamental characters. Crying doesn't make a Western edgy and realistic, as Dominik seems to want it to do. It simply suggests another kind of Romance that is not heroic. I don't prefer that approach to the gritty realism of, say, an Unforgiven. If you're a Pitt or Affleck fan, however, you can do worse than a viewing.
Verdict: 3/5 stars
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