THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
Slow and inexorable, Andrew Dominik’s Assassination of Jesse James follows America’s favorite Western villainous hero to his end, the bullet in the back he receives from the boy who idolizes him, Bob Ford. That fatal shot resolves the ambivalence of either figure: James, a psychotic, for the torment of having an illusion of controlling the world that his paranoia, lack of self-control, and the haunting, bitter failure of the South in the American Civil War contest; Ford, an unformed kid, for feeling that he is a nobody whose only connection to substance depends on Jesse’s shadow, whose light he covets and whose darkness he desperately desires to shake loose from. Such a premise invites a great film. This is not it.
“Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?” Jesse asks this of Bob, sitting naked in a bath pail, with Bob having crept up behind him, Jesse’s back to him, an echo of how he has insinuated himself generally into Jesse’s company, and also an echo of Bob’s future murder of Jesse. Dominik is not as successful as John Ford in evoking that double sense of time, legend at the time of actual existence, the actuality, as part of cultural memory, that has become legend. Dominik may make dialogue sound echo-y, and he may direct his otherwise crisp cinematographer, Roger Deakins, to have patches of the screen be out-of-focus (the old vaseline trick); but these tricks call too much attention to themselves to succeed in imbuing the past with the haunted difference in time between it and us. The voiceover works better at this, but the film’s elements never come together.
This is certainly not a bad film, but a thin one, especially if one recalls Walter Hill’s beauteous, compelling The Long Riders (1980), with Carradines as the Youngers and Keaches as the Jameses. The belated effort of Missouri to take down Jesse James is an especially unconvincing element in Dominik’s film. Another is Bob Ford’s vulnerability to being killed by Jesse unless Bob kills Jesse first.
Neither Brad Pitt nor Casey Affleck, as Jesse and Bob, do more than skim a surface despite their acting accolades.
This entry was posted on February 26, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Informal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
Slow and inexorable, Andrew Dominik’s Assassination of Jesse James follows America’s favorite Western villainous hero to his end, the bullet in the back he receives from the boy who idolizes him, Bob Ford. That fatal shot resolves the ambivalence of either figure: James, a psychotic, for the torment of having an illusion of controlling the world that his paranoia, lack of self-control, and the haunting, bitter failure of the South in the American Civil War contest; Ford, an unformed kid, for feeling that he is a nobody whose only connection to substance depends on Jesse’s shadow, whose light he covets and whose darkness he desperately desires to shake loose from. Such a premise invites a great film. This is not it.
“Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?” Jesse asks this of Bob, sitting naked in a bath pail, with Bob having crept up behind him, Jesse’s back to him, an echo of how he has insinuated himself generally into Jesse’s company, and also an echo of Bob’s future murder of Jesse. Dominik is not as successful as John Ford in evoking that double sense of time, legend at the time of actual existence, the actuality, as part of cultural memory, that has become legend. Dominik may make dialogue sound echo-y, and he may direct his otherwise crisp cinematographer, Roger Deakins, to have patches of the screen be out-of-focus (the old vaseline trick); but these tricks call too much attention to themselves to succeed in imbuing the past with the haunted difference in time between it and us. The voiceover works better at this, but the film’s elements never come together.
This is certainly not a bad film, but a thin one, especially if one recalls Walter Hill’s beauteous, compelling The Long Riders (1980), with Carradines as the Youngers and Keaches as the Jameses. The belated effort of Missouri to take down Jesse James is an especially unconvincing element in Dominik’s film. Another is Bob Ford’s vulnerability to being killed by Jesse unless Bob kills Jesse first.
Neither Brad Pitt nor Casey Affleck, as Jesse and Bob, do more than skim a surface despite their acting accolades.
This entry was posted on February 26, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Informal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.