#15. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
(director: Andrew Dominik; starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell and Sam Shepard)
A trademark of good filmmaking is the ability to transport you to a time and place, to get lost within the world the characters inhabit and respond as if you were right there with them; there’s always a moment of sadness as the film nears the end credits that we have to leave this fictional world and face reality once again. Such is the case with Andrew Dominik’s contemplative revisionist western, who spends the better part of a nearly three-hour film simply crafting a richly atmospheric setting in the 1880’s Missouri plains, filled with spectacular vistas and authentic period sets, the cinematography by Roger Deakins at times had me expecting to see the fog roll off my breath as two characters cross a frozen lake, or to swat at locusts as two brothers secretly plot a murder in a late summer field of grain. Some people might say this slow, deliberate sense of pace is excessive and indulgent on the part of the director; I say, “where can I see the four-hour cut that the film originally premiered with?” That all said, there’s a fantastically subversive storyline to be discovered for those with the patience to sit through it. Watch as Robert Ford’s star-struck idolization of celebrated outlaw Jesse James when he first meets him slowly turns into a creepy (and some would say latently homosexual) desire to become his hero by plotting to kill him; from there it’s not hard to draw the parallels to the present day’s rabid celebrity culture and the various psychoses it inspires.
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