The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominik
Outlaw Jesse James is rumored to be the 'fastest gun in the West'. An eager recruit into James' notorious gang, Robert Ford eventually grows jealous of the famed outlaw and, when Robert and his brother sense an opportunity to kill James, their murderous action elevates their target to near mythical status.
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What critics say influenced The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
The title recalls Peter Weiss’ play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (usually referred to as Marat/Sade for obvious reasons).
He's like a prairie version of the Joe Pesci character in "Goodfellas" – an innocent remark by a cohort inspires waves of paranoia.
In truth, the story of Jesse and Robert is a mob tale set in the Old West and disguised as a treatise on fame – is Robert Ford really any different than Henry Hill, the “Goodfellas” gangster who chose a life as an informant over death?
September 8, 2007 - On the heels of the more audience-friendly shoot 'em-up 3:10 to Yuma comes the ponderous but often pretentious epic The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford -- an intriguing visual poem starring Brad Pitt as the Old West icon and Casey Affleck, Pitt's co-star in the Ocean's films, as James' assassin.
Director
William Beaudine
Critics compare The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to 2 of Beaudine’s films.
James has also been the subject of dozens of movies dating back to the 1920s, the most curious surely being "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter," by the awesomely prolific B-movie director William Beaudine.
(He also shot a companion cheapie that same year called "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula."
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Echoes of everything from “The Talented Mr. Ripley” to “All About Eve” appear throughout the film, both of which are certainly unusual reference points for a Western.
Director
Sam Peckinpah
Critics compare The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to 2 of Peckinpah’s films.
Andrew Dominik, who made the raw, gritty, irresistible Chopper just seven years ago, got his hands on DVDs of Terrence Malick’s films, Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, and a few other nouveau westerns and picked his very favorite parts, took Warner Bros’ $50 million, and the passion of Brad Pitt (which I would never mock in any way, though it as led to some terrible choices), and a cadre of very good actors and made one of the most obnoxiously taste-free stews imagineable.
At the risk of overselling the film, since my review is written right after watching it, my impression is that Dominik has made a poignant modernist Western that ranks with Arthur Penn’s achievement in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), Same Peckinpah’s grand, eloquent Westerns (specifically “The Wild Bunch,” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”) and Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”
Andrew Dominik, who made the raw, gritty, irresistible Chopper just seven years ago, got his hands on DVDs of Terrence Malick’s films, Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, and a few other nouveau westerns and picked his very favorite parts, took Warner Bros’ $50 million, and the passion of Brad Pitt (which I would never mock in any way, though it as led to some terrible choices), and a cadre of very good actors and made one of the most obnoxiously taste-free stews imagineable.
Director
Terrence Malick
Critics compare The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to 4 of Malick’s films.
Overlaid with a quietly ironic narration that suggests – along with the haunting isolation of figures in Alberta's vast natural spaces – the influence of Badlands' Terrence Malick, and shot by the estimable Roger Deakins in a manner that frequently gives the edges of the frame a prismatic quality, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is itself a movie that plays out somewhere between the realm of self-conscious myth and grimy human tragedy.
Like " McCabe and Mrs. Miller " and " Days of Heaven ," it was photographed in the wide open spaces of western Canada, where the land is so empty, it creates a vacuum demanding men to become legends.
Getting to the assassination of the title requires a stupendously excessive drift from point A to point B, during which Dominik demonstrates all he learned on his stint a few years ago as a second-unit director for "The New World," Terrence Malick's retelling of the John Smith-Pocahontas relationship.
At almost three hours long, this film plays like one of Terrence Malick's lesser efforts (e.g., The New World) and is the kind of self-indulgent and artsy western that helped kill off the genre 30 years ago.
Ponderousness hung over the movie, just as it did in Malick's ecology's-eye-view of World War II, "The Thin Red Line."
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At the risk of overselling the film, since my review is written right after watching it, my impression is that Dominik has made a poignant modernist Western that ranks with Arthur Penn’s achievement in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), Same Peckinpah’s grand, eloquent Westerns (specifically “The Wild Bunch,” and “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid”) and Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.”
Under its sober grandiosity, Jesse can’t even wrangle with Clint Eastwood’s overrated Unforgiven or Lawrence Kasdan’s underseen Wyatt Earp among would-be revisionist westerns, let alone the most dense examples of the genre in the last 20 years, TV’s “Lonesome Dove” and “Deadwood.”
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a surprising near-masterpiece, certainly one of the year's best films, and the best Western to come across the range since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1996).
There are mythic elements in neo-Westerns from the nameless archetypes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to the ethereal winter of McCabe & Mrs. Miller to the storybook man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition at the heart of Unforgiven , but none of those films have what this film has: a narrator.