Take a look at the new trailer for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Could the nods to Malick be any more obvious?

Could Casey Affleck be on his way to surpassing his brother and becoming the Great Affleck?*

Could this be as good as the trailer makes it look?

I can't wait.


(I don't know that I'll ever see that guy without thinking, "That's the guy with the... um... attachment to a baseball glove in Good Will Hunting.")

Yeah I would agree that many of the shots included in the trailer seem to be inspired by Days of Heaven. Also, there is a shot in there where Jesse James is running his hands through the wheat which is almost an exact take from Gladiator. I find it funny how the more you watch movies, the more you pick up how unoriginal so many shots are.

Much of this film was shot about 10 minutes from my house at Fort Edmonton Park, a historical reproduction of early Edmonton. It's a great place for families to spend time -- we've had an annual pass more than once. It will be an extra reason for me to see this.

Jeffrey Wells' latest blog entry on this film only increases my anticipation.

: Could Casey Affleck be on his way to surpassing
: his brother and becoming the Great Affleck?

Um, dude, he's always been. (Not that it takes much work, given the competition.)

Dale

David Poland HAAAAAATES it.

The Associated Press:

At the heart of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" lies an obsessive, destructive relationship between two disparate yet oddly similar men. One eventually will kill the other.

Yet this fascinating relationship gets smothered in pointlessly long takes, repetitive scenes, grim Western landscapes and mumbled, heavily accented dialogue. The self-indulgence begins with director Andrew Dominik and infects much of the cast, who deliver meandering, unstable performances. Instead of contemplating the moral dimensions of novelist Ron Hansen's portrait of outlaw paranoia and obsession, a viewer can only think of waste -- the waste of good material and themes, a talented cast and, most crucially, the viewer's own time.

Jeffrey Wells responds to Poland.

Karina @ Spoutblog:

Two weeks ago, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford was the film Warner Brothers had "no idea what to do with." As of this writing, it's the most gushed-over title at the Toronto Film Festival, and word has hit the wires that star Brad Pitt has won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. If the folks at WB still havn't figured out what to do with Andrew Dominik's masterful, Malickean tragedy of celebrity envy, they probably don't deserve to have their name on it. . . .

In other words, Jesse James looks like a painting and plays like an epic novel. There are immediate pleasures to be found in the cinematography and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' eerie score, and in the sexy, comic subplot touched off by a character named Dick Liddil's inability to keep his namesake in his pants. But otherwise, it's likely the most "difficult" film produced with Hollywood money and starring an A-list star since Eyes Wide Shut. It demands repeat viewings, and as such, it'll either be a massive commercial failure, or it'll touch off a new wave of American cinephilia. I guess it's clear which option I'm rooting for.

This movie has the best name for a Western of any movie, ever.

Exactly. After the scary/brilliant score for the Proposition, I'm ready for more.

Wildly mixed reviews for this one so far, but I like Andrew Sarris:

But not to quibble, the extraordinary expressive performers, male and female; the haunting interior and exterior conflicts; the painstaking authenticity of the period detail; and the subtly modulated mood shifts all combine to make a modern masterpiece of an old legend. All in all, Assassination is the most compelling piece of psychological drama you are likely to see in this moviegoing year. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Affleck are well worthy of Oscars. Perhaps they can share one together.

Armond White:

The entire film is a conceit. It signals Dominik's intention to reproduce the now-vaunted postmodern aspects of '70s moviemaking -- those great westerns by Peckinpah, Aldrich, Altman, Penn and Hill. Yet, while recalling the comically extended title of Robert Altman's great 1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Or Sitting Bull's History Lesson -- where Altman used Paul Newman's star power to analyze the beauty and terror of American showbiz and gangster legend -- Dominik stops short of true revisionism. He uses Brad Pitt's iconography without the inquiring skepticism of Altman's satire. Instead, Dominik merely swoons over Pitt/Jesse, entrapped by macho mystique.

This all might have worked had Pitt exuded more personality -- like his sexy swagger in Fight Club or his romantic glow in Meet Joe Black. Pitt's not a strong enough actor to make the enigma of a pathological killer compelling. He lacks the feral menace that Eric Bana brought to Dominik's 1999 Australian real-life killer thriller, Chopper. Dominik treats Jesse James as a mythic figure, idolizing criminality as an American essence and mistaking this personal enthrallment as something profound. . . .

It is the film's crystalline photography that reveals Dominik and Deakins mostly had specific 1970s landmarks in mind: They facetiously copy the arty naturalism of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven and the pop-artiness of Coppola's male soap opera, The Godfather. But Dominik's script lacks Coppola's narrative drive. The comprehensible human tragedies that Jesse James and Robert Ford left to history are glossed over by too much surface elegance and not enough substance. While Dominik emulates the last great period of American filmmaking innovation (with its complex examination of social tradition), his movie still seems remote from what motivated those artists who set out to investigate the national legacies they inherited.

Dominik plays that Tarantino-generation game of moral detachment; he's excited by the display of violence in cultural forms from pulp movies to grindhouse movies. But that idiot-savantry -- romanticizing Jesse James and Ford's sickness -- is a way of inflating his own adolescent silliness. There's a tremendous gap in Dominik's film knowledge: He doesn't know -- or understand -- the transforming postmodernism of Walter Hill's 1980 historical myth, The Long Riders. When Hill's Robert Ford (Christopher Guest) aimed his gun at his idol and pronounced, "I Shot Jesse James," it also evoked American mythology (including the title of Sam Fuller's 1949 feature) to the nth degree. Dominik does little more than recreate the fake, burnish historicism of Road to Perdition. . . .

Dang. I just remembered to place a hold on the library copy of the book on which this movie is based, but I'm late: I'm number 20 in the holds queue, which means the only way I'll get to the novel before the movie releases is if I buy a copy. Not gonna happen.

But Ron Hansen is an amazing writer. His Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus are two of my favorite novels.

Has any review of this film commented on whether the tone and pace match the book? Not that I've seen, although I haven't read every review of the movie so far.

I've only read excerpts from the book, but from my reading the film is remarkably faithful to the book, with the glaring exception of some graphic, explicit obscene dialogue in the first scene, which AFAICT corresponds to nothing in the book. (A later, offscreen sexual encounter in the film is taken from the book, and is filmed very much as written.)

SDG, you've seen it?! PM me! The screening's on a very busy week for me, and I'm trying to decide whether to rush out and see it, or wait until later.

You have a screening tonight? My wordcount-limited review is up at NCRegister.com. The unexpurgated one will be up on DF tomorrow. No time to PM, but you can call me at home if you want.

No, my screening's on October 1. And that's during a very busy week.

Okay, here 'tis.

That's also the date of my screening.

Oh, wow, I haven't seen this comparison made elsewhere, and it hadn't occurred to me, but if anyone here remembers the long-running A&F avatar I once had, and my expressed admiration for the film in question, you'll understand why my excitement over Jesse James is building, even as I try to keep it in check.

Perhaps its closest antecedent is Walter Hill's underrated Wild Bill, another story of an outlaw who had the misfortune of being a legend before his death, thus inviting fame-seekers to strike him down. Both films derive a sick sort of tension from the inevitable, as their paranoid anti-heroes wait for an end that they seem to know is coming.

Christian wrote:
: Jeffrey Overstreet wrote:

: : No, my screening's on October 1. And that's during a very busy week.
:
: That's also the date of my screening.

I still don't have a clue when there will be a screening in my own neck of the woods. Bizarrely, I have now received TWO press releases announcing that the film opens in Toronto today and in Calgary on October 5. But Vancouver? I asked, and was told they had no info yet.

As I mentioned earlier (I think), the announcement a week or two ago about the Oct. 5 opening in D.C. stressed that there still wasn't a date for a broader release.

Well yeah, but Vancouver typically gets films before Calgary does, not the other way around. Maybe they just don't want it to conflict with the film festival going on here. Then again, why aren't they SHOWING it in the festival? It's a Warner Brothers film, and Warner has been on good terms with the VIFF for years, near as I can tell.

Barbara Nicolosi:



That's a funny line. I thought Carville's line-reading was fine, but everyone in the audience tittered when he was introduced. Everyone. That can't be good.



Really? Those extra minutes clarify and expand upon themes of celebrity and entertainment. I thought they were stronger than the climactic sequence described in the title. Maybe I'll think differently tomorrow.

Um. That is not what "jumping the shark" means. "Casting James Carville" could conceivably come to be an idiom for that, but this would not involve replacing "jumping the shark," which means something else.


I'm with you, Christian.

Wonderful movie.

Pitt was very impressive (although he did most of his acting with his tongue and his jaw). Affleck deserves all of the accolades he's getting.

But for me, the shining performance of this film was Sam Rockwell's. In some ways, I think he had the toughest role in the movie. He had to be wretched without being repulsive, an idiot without being too annoying, a little scary but still endearing. Great work.

I was startled and delighted by Nick Cave's surprise cameo.

And Zooey Deschanel can do so much with so little screentime.

The film is earning so many Malick comparisons, but I'm not sure that works for me. In Malick's films, the cinematography does more than create a mood. It becomes a language in itself, an ongoing poetry. Here, the cinematography was gorgeous, to be sure, and one of the best reasons to see the movie. But I'm not convinced that the imagery was meaningful in the way that Malick's is meaningful. It gave a particular "looking back through the blurry lens of time" aesthetic to the film, but none of the imagery became visual metaphors... at least to me, in my first viewing.

That's not a complaint, really. I'm just saying the film did not feel much like a Malick film to me at all.

And I actually really appreciated the last act of the film. I appreciated what that chapter has to say about the public... about the way we turn criminals into legends and celebrities, the way we almost revere them if they pull of their crimes with audacity and personality. (Made me think of the way audiences cheer for Hannibal Lecter during The Silence of the Lambs.) And I thought that last stretch contained some of Affleck's finest moments. Once again Barbara seems to want the story to follow a typical entertainment formula (although I'm pleased that she enjoyed the snail's pace storytelling of the rest of the film). She's decided that the film is all about the assassination, and doesn't seem to see that the film rises above that perceived subject to become something so much more in those final scenes.

Ditto with Jeffrey's comments, almost down to the jots and tittles. Saw it in LA at the Arclight on Saturday.

The film reminded more of the Coens' quiet moments than anything else -- an awful lot of Miller's Crossing, and Fargo, with some threads from Barton Fink to boot. (And I am talking about the quiet moments in the Coens' films.)

SDG wrote:
: Um. That is not what "jumping the shark" means.

Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey Overstreet wrote:
: And Zooey Deschanel can do so much with so little screentime.

[ blink ] Okay, now I'm even MORE ticked that there's no Vancouver screening/release date for this film yet.

I wrote this in my notes!!
ESPECIALLY when Jesse takes Liddle "for a ride"... it felt so much like the "walks in the woods" in Miller's Crossing.

And, Roger Deakins was the cinematographer for two of those three films as well.

I'm not fully in the "wonderful" camp on this film, but I'm tipping favorable. I'm hesitant to praise it because I fear that the film's fans are going to hail it as a masterpiece. I don't think it rises to that level, yet slow, methodical movies that are more successful than not tend to be loudly heralded by their most rabid supporters.

Affleck is the more surprising performer here, but Pitt impressed me more, maybe because this performance furthers my reassessment of the actor that began with Babel. That was a better Pitt performance, but he's really quite good in this role, too.

EDIT: I should add that the film's most rabid supporters might be right. I'm not convinced, but they might be right.

I'm far from calling it a "masterpiece." It's a good story, told with visual eloquence and admirably restrained scripting. The cinematogrpahy was, at times, almost too showy. And the hand-in-the-grass thing was a Cinema-Literate Allusion when Ridley Scott used it in Gladiator, and so it provokes eye-rolling here. But I look forward to whatever Dominick does next.

I'm very tempted to go back and see Chopper now. I remember that Chopper was the movie that put Eric Bana on the map, but that wasn't enough to make me set aside time to watch it.

After Christian and I walked out of the screening yesterday night, I was trying to work through why I felt disappointed with the movie. There are definite parallels with Zodiac, another movie about a criminal on the run from justice which spans vast amounts of time and doesn't always ground itself as firmly (in other words, give slow people like me solid information about where we are and what is happening at any given moment) as a conventionally told narrative would. This asynchronous, slow-moving style is tiring to watch over the span of a 160-minute movie, and I admit it got to me. There were moments which sort of burst out of the texture - notably the visually stunning beginning of the train robbery, and some of the voice-over narration, which was admirably clear and insightful. But I struggled to keep my attention from flagging (sorry, Christian, if my fidgeting was distracting!) and I can't say that I'll recommend this movie to others unless they're movie buffs.

I'm wondering if there are specific flaws which a second viewing would help me to point out. There are some problems with switching perspective on the fly; in general, of course, the movie has an omniscient, distant mode of narration (and I don't just mean in the voice-over), but there are some scenes, especially as we near the end, which seem to adopt one character or another's viewpoint in a potentially problematic way. And SDG, you call the musical score "untraditional but haunting" - but except for in the titular scene I found it quite banal and repetitive. Then again, that's what I thought about James Horner's score for The New World too, until I re-listened to it later and found that there were nuances which helped me to appreciate it better. (Does anyone know if they plan to release this movie's soundtrack on CD? I assume they do, but I can't seem to find any information about it online.)

This one may just require multiple viewings for those of us whose attention spans are not all they could be.

I also saw this at the ArcLight on Saturday. Greg, you were there, too? Ships passing in the night…

Aside from the student-filmy device of filling the screen with pregnant, meaningful pauses (upon which the audience can heap their own conjectures), Dominik does a creditable job of holding your attention while maintaining a sleepy, languorous pace. And while the technical contributions are unimpeachable, I was left wondering, where's the psychological depth? It's clear Dominik is reaching for existential import, but he fails to illuminate the soul of Jesse James and rather reductively chalks up Bob Ford's actions to a severe case of celebrity envy.



Pitt's pretty good (to use Jeffrey's parlance, "He'll probably get a nomination."), but for me, the standout performer among the rather excellent cast is Garret Dillahunt as Ed Miller, the naive yokel whose conscience refuses to rest. The scene where gives an account of his appointment with a "real specific" woman is funny as well as sympathetic, as is the later one in which he is reduced to a bundle of frayed nerves on account of Jesse's surprise visit. His death scene is one of the few moments that achieves true tragedy—when he gets a bullet in the back, the waste is deeply felt. It's a minor performance but a great one.

And I'm glad he didn't try. Wasn't the subject of the story. Jesse was an enigma, and we're teased with possibilities. That's enough for me.



Wow, I didn't think he reduced anything or arrived at any particular conclusion about Bob. Bob was picked on, and envied the strong. Bob was slow-witted, and he envied the smart. Bob left no good impression on anybody, and he envied the bold and the beautiful. Bob's dreams of legends and giants were betrayed, and he wanted to lash out at those who disappointed him. Bob's desire to Be Somebody and Do Something overpowered his admiration and love for the one man who really inspired him. Bob wanted to "be a man," but what is that, exactly?

Fear does strange things to people... David's reference to Zodiac is a good one, as both films show many ways that fear poisons and gains control of us. It would be interesting to discuss the different forms of fear in the film. Even Jesse seems afraid at times, and that's one of the "teases" we're given about him. He is afraid of giving up "the life" ... which makes me think of Unforgiven. Come to think of it, there's a lot of Unforgiven overlap here: The young boy who idolizes the gunslinger, and then finds out that the legends aren't what they seem. The gunslinger who has "looked over the edge" (but William Munny was terrified of death, where Jesse doesn't seem to fear it anymore... in fact he courts it.)

Then there's the fact that Bob's one claim to fame is, in fact, not true. Could Jesse have stopped him? You better believe it. Jesse knew it was coming. He opened up the opportunity. He surrendered. He dove into it headlong.

Ah, good. Just making sure. I think part of my dissatisfaction with the film had to do with my inability to sympathize with Bob or track his progression from simpering sycofant to psychopathic killer. Consequently, the emotions actually achieved were far weaker than those imagined. (Luckily, Jeffrey, you have a very agile imagination.)


Did I read this correctly? Less politely: did you write this correctly? Could you elaborate on how Assassination comments on the film medium?

Just trying to find some solid footing here. Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

HA!!!

I meant to write "as both films show many ways that FEAR poisons and gains control of us."

SO sorry. How confusing.

Here's Jeffrey Wells, commenting on a note I sent to him:

"I know you have issues with Christianity," a reader wrote this morning, "but given your admiration for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I thought you might be interested in this appraisal by Catholic critic (and screenwriting-workshop coach) Barbara Nicolosi, who greatly admires it."

I don't have issues with Christianity. I have issues with right-wing Christians, particularly the kind focused on in Tony Kaye's abortion documentary Lake of Fire. The Romans may not have thrown Christians to the lions in ancient times (as famously depicted in Cecil B. DeMIlle's Sign of the Cross and Chester Erskine's Androcles and the Lion) and if they did do this it was terribly wrong. People should be free to worship freely, and having your throat torn open by a lion with bad breath is a ghastly way to die.

That said, I think I partly understand why the Romans were so motivated.

Comments ensue.

Here's a link to this post in the A&F thread on Lake of Fire.

Well, whaddyaknow? I started working on a review, and it's coming out much more positive than my comments here might indicate. When I visited the movie's Web site while working on the review, the images and music really grabbed me. Maybe I liked this more than I realized in the immediate aftermath of seeing it.

Not too many folks posting in this thread, and in light of the $6,610 per-screen average last weekend on a very limited number of screens, it’s easy to see why. It’s also easy to predict that this movie, which is impressive in many ways, won’t be around long after it expands to many more theaters this coming weekend. It’s a “flop” waiting to be rejected by the broader public.

Too bad. Christopher Orr calls it the best film so far this year, and goes on to say it’s the best Western since Sergio Leone’s breathtaking Once Upon a Time in the West! I wouldn’t go that far. Heavens!

But it’s definitely worth seeing. As noted above, I found the film’s strength’s lingering in my mind, and its weaknesses receding, in the days after seeing it. And since my reviews don’t feed into “A Look Outside,” I hope you all won’t mind if I link to it here.

I loved it. The more I read about it, the more I love it. (And the bad reviews seem to have missed the point so severely that it just increases my appreciation all the more.)

Definitely a top-tenner. But no, not the best Western... or the best gangster... movie, even if you're measuring by the last few years. It's an exquisitely crafted, literary, and (thank goodness) thoughtfully-paced movie. Apparently some people need attractive, charismatic leading characters. Me, I think creeps and fools are sometimes much more interesting.

Yeah, I'm sure it'll be among my Top 10 as well.

One scene that hasn't been commented on here, but which is mentioned in nearly every review I've read, is the train robbery. And it deserves every accolade it received. When the screen goes dark, and those lights appear, and then the stacked wood -- that's just beautiful. It's almost too perfect, but dang if it ain't gorgeous!

Nathaniel wrote:



Yes, I thought he was the most memorable of the supporting players, but the entire cast was good, don't you think? One of the things I liked best about the movie is the way it shows these thieves to be weak-kneed, fearful men when confronted by Jesse. There's nothing admirable about any of them, although the deaths of some of them, like Ed, are, like you said, tragic.

This was a beautiful film and an absorbing character study. I thought the deliberate pace was appropriate time for the time period, when everything moved much slower. Affleck and Pitt both deserve Oscar nominations, showing a lot of character development in tone of voice and facial expressions. The scenes with the two of them, the emotional chess these guys were playing, were so good that the my attention span lagged a bit where Robert Ford or Jesse James weren't on the screen. Even though the performances by the minor characters were excellent as well, particularly Sam Rockwell.

And I thought the end of the film, the post-assassination part, was the most interesting part. Seeing Nick Cave's cameo was really cool, and the reflection of the nature of the celebrity culture even a hundred fifty years ago shows that there's nothing new under the sun.

Glad to hear you liked it, Crow.

Hey, where was Nick Cave's cameo? I wasn't looking for it and missed it.

He sang the bloody song about Jesse James in the tavern scene!

I should've guessed! Thanks.

A late-arriving birthday present from a friend with connections...

My take on this is a bit different. Although envy certainly comes into play, I don't see that is the prime focus. Rather this is an examination of the loss of faith -- to be sure, a misplaced faith, but for Bob, this was a discovery that his god did not bring the blessings he expected in spite of Bob's dedication to walk in that god's way. For me, the saddest line in the film is when Bob says to Charley, "He's just a man." When faith so extreme as Bob's is lost, there is no option but to kill the god that has not delivered.

OK, you are all free to roll your eyes now.

I like that, Darrel. We tend to lose sight of what "hero worship" actually means, don't we?

No eyes rolling here. (Can't think of "eye-rolling" without thinking of a scene from Minority Report.)