The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Review

Overall Rating

Actors.

Plodding and long.

This is, from what I can glean from history, a fairly accurate portrayal of the last months of Jesse James' life. Growing increasingly paranoid and maybe slightly more psychotic from lack of sleep and worry, James is trying to ensure that those in a position to possibly cooperate with the law at his expense are dealt with. It is these circumstances that lead twenty year old Bob Ford and his brother Charlie to come to the decision to kill him. Did Ford shoot an unarmed James in the back of the head as he stood on a chair and dusted a picture on the wall? Yes, partly because he knew that James was eventually going to kill the Ford brothers and partly for the notoriety it would bring him. This movie is more about Ford than James, from their first train robbery together (Jesse and Frank James last) through the events that lead up to the killing and the events after, up to the assassination of Ford himself ten years later. Unlike the glamorization of James both then and now, this movie shows him for the cold blooded killer he was. He was a man not to be trusted, but a man to be feared. This movie is long, 2 hours and 40 minutes, and it seems to move at the speed of molasses in the dead of winter, yet it was compelling enough for me to sit through it and not be disappointed I did so. Certainly not for everybody, much more of a character study than a shoot 'em up western, it is none the less a good film.