- The problem with having a film with an absolutely wonderful title like this is that you spend the entirety of the film wondering when the heck the titular murder is going to happen. This would be fine if there had been any modicum of suspense to the film; however, instead of suspense or even a slow build of motivation, it just sort of plods along until the narrator mercifully announces that the day before Jesse James died was Palm Sunday because you know that, finally, we’re getting down to the meat of the matter.
- This movie is indeed very long (two hours and forty minutes) but despite the fact that nothing much seems to really happen for most of the film, it doesn’t feel long, which I think is nothing short of a miracle. Don’t go into this expecting a shoot ‘em up style western because that is not what you will get; it’s mostly interior drama between dour looking individuals whose colour has been sapped out of their faces by the unrelenting cold. It’s kind of like Brokeback Mountain in that respsect; it’s got the same sort of pacing and attempts at character study.
- Can someone explain to me this weird trend of narrating a story that doesn’t need to be narrated? I first noticed it in Little Children and now it’s cropped up again in this movie. I’ve come to see a movie, not to listen to an audiobook: stop describing things I can see perfectly fine or that are completely unnecessary to say. There was some useful background information delivered by the narrator, but on the whole I’m sure there were other ways to impart that information to the audience without making me feel talked at.
- This movie has the opposite problem that Eastern Promises does: it’s needlessly complex. Perhaps complex isn’t the right word, because it’s not like the multiple subplots are hard to follow, they’re just completely unnecessary. These subplots are tied up in Jesse James’ story, obviously, but there was almost too much focus on them at times. The movie really would have benefited from spending more time with James and Ford to take a really penetrating look at their relationship rather than wasting time gallivanting around with minor and interchangeable members of the James Gang. They could have shaved about forty-five minutes off the film if they had condensed all the subplots.
- Brad Pitt played Jesse James like a weird cross between Tyler Durden and Princess Diana. I don’t even know how to begin to explain that, but there it is.
- Mary Louise Parker is completely wasted in a role that has approximately eight lines and a lot of flitting around the periphery of the story.
- There are obvious parallels here between the Jesse James story and the nature of current celebrity, complete with lack of privacy and obsessive fanboys that would have earned Robert Ford a restraining order if he had behaved this way a century later. The problem is that the film does nothing to really show us why Robert Ford fanboyed Jesse James so hard. The narrator briefly goes through the James Gang’s resumé of train robberies and bank heists at the start of the film, but the single heist we see the Gang execute at the start of the movie is a complete failure. This is not the stuff legends are made of. We later see Robert Ford going through a shoe box of James Gang press clippings and comics that he’s collected since he was a young child, but although you get a vague sense that there was much brash glory behind the Gang earlier in their career, it is, again, stuff that happens only off screen. Granted, Ford himself would only have heard about their lawless greatness through hearsay and wanted posters, so maybe this limited perspective is designed to allow us to get deeper into Ford’s psyche. If that’s the case, though, it really failed me as a viewer. Nothing about this movie would explain to me why anyone would bother naming their band The James Gang, for example.
- I think the film misleads you somewhat in making you think that this is a movie about Jesse James and the problem is it’s not, it’s about Robert Ford, only the further problem is that we don’t get enough screen time with Ford for the film to really be about him either. After James gets shot, you’re left thinking there can’t be more than two or three minutes left in the film, except it just keeps going and going with multiple endings. Or perhaps not multiple endings, just multiple places where the director could have drawn a line and said “This is where it ends” but chose not to. It’s just chapter after truncated chapter in Ford’s life, post-assassination, and while I think it does help paint a picture of the sadness inherent to his character, it just wasn’t necessary.
- Now that I think about it, this movie is pretty much just a western version of The King of Comedy, with Brad Pitt in the Jerry Lewis role and Casey Affleck in the Robert De Niro role. Only Jerry Lewis doesn’t die in The King of Comedy (spoiler alert!). You get the same sense of desperation and delusions of grandeur from both Robert Ford and Rupert Pupkin without either of their idols ever being shown to be anything terribly interesting on whom you might base a fixation. The King of Comedy at least had the decency to condense it’s equivalent of the post-assasination stuff into a two-minute window, though.
- Casey Affleck. Casey Affleck. I completely adore you. He was just so perfect as Robert Ford, with all the right ratios of desperation and enthusiasm and self-serving eagerness to please. He was good all the way through the film, as was Brad Pitt, but they both brought out the big guns (LITERALLY! * kneeslap *) for Pitt’s final scene (not counting those where is pretending to be a corpse). It makes you sort of wish that the rest of the script had the same sort of depth to it, since this was the most straightforward scene and yet simultaneously the most emotional. Casey Affleck really needs to be in all films, ever, for the rest of time.
- All that said, the more I think about it, the more I think this movie could really grow on a person upon multiple viewings (assuming you have that much time on your hands).
- Despite the potential for having a really awesome end credit sequence done in a similar typographic style as the one used for the titles in the teaser trailer, they chose instead to use a boring old sans-serif font in white on a black background. Have these people no imagination? So disappointed.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Spoiler alert for the title!
IMDB Plot Synopsis Robert Ford, who's idolized Jesse James since childhood, tries hard to join the reforming gang of the Missouri outlaw, but gradually becomes resentful of the bandit leader.