Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Prairie
Tragedy
(The Assassination of Jesse James..., 10/29/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Chris
Rock has a bit about slain rapper Tupac Shakur that goes: "Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Malcolm X was assassinated
... that n-g-r [Shakur] was shot." Something similar might
be said of calling the death of Western outlaw Jesse James an "assassination"—just
what cause, what greater ideal, was endangered by the ignominious demise
of a man like James, a thief who gunned down more than a dozen men?
Indeed, the manner of his death only burnished his legend.
Which is another way of saying that
terrific movies like Andew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James
by the Coward Robert Ford can still be based on imperfect premises.
A few weeks ago, James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma was held up in
this column as a sign that there's some life left in the old Western
genre. Dominik's stately, meditative epic is evidence not only of life,
but that its still possible to make a Western that's a piece of art.
Equally important, it's also still possible to get it out for people
to see.
As just about half the planet knows,
Brad Pitt plays James in his last days. Years of gunslinging and robbery
haven't been kind to the outlaw, who's now forced to uproot his family
on a regular basis. Afflicted with the semi-distant stare of someone
wrestling with a life of regrets, James seems to live now only to cost
the peace of everyone around him, including himself. Not even his brother
Frank (Sam Shepard) will have anything to do with him anymore.
James is joined in his downward
spiral by Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), the baby-faced relative of a
henchman with a fan-boy's fixation on the famous outlaw. What happens
after Ford joins James sadly-depleted little gang is obvious from the
title—half the pleasure of Dominik's film is watching the celebrity
draw his doom inevitably toward himself, as in a classical tragedy.
The other half is purely sensual.
For Assassination is a truly beautiful piece of work, an elegy
with verses in light and sound. A train robbery toward the film's beginning
is a brilliant reprise of a set-piece that is as old as the Western
itself, except that Dominik paints it in the kind of velvety shadows
and beams of light that conceal as much as they show. With its evocative
landscapes and plaintive, half-nostalgic score by Nick Cave and Warren
Ellis, the film achieves what Terence (Badlands) Malick has tried
to achieve, but only occasionally accomplished, since his comeback.
Good as Pitt is, it is Casey Affleck
who's the real revelation here. His Robert Ford is highly off-putting
at first—a representative of the sort of twitchy, eager-to-please
type often seen in undergraduates who habitually buttonhole professors
after class. Yet as we watch Ford's character suffer and deepen, we
begin to sense he might be right when he warns folks not to underestimate
him. After he shoots Jesse, he expects to be applauded, but finds only
contempt and ridicule. He's comes as a disappointment after the handsome,
bigger-than-life James, but he's still better than the petty avengers
who follow him.
Assassination isn't for everyone.
With a running-time of 160 minutes, the film is definitely not the cinematic
equivalent of a bag of popcorn and a Coke. Some—in particular,
those who don't take movies seriously—might find it awfully slow
and pretentious. Those folks will always have the multiplex. For once,
the rest of us get to enjoy a full-course meal.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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