The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the greatest film of 2007. The ensemble acting is spot on, with Brad Pitt doing surprisingly effective, complex work, his best by far since Twelve Monkeys, and the better performance of the two. Sam Rockwell is excellent as always. Casey Affleck deserves all the notice he recieved, though in my opinion he really is the lead actor despite being labelled as supporting. Roger Deakin's cinematography is the best he's ever done, and that's really saying something, considering the brilliance of his work in general. Every shot in this film is perfectly composed, from the framing to the lighting to the angles. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's score is, like that of The Proposition, beautiful and subtle, and Cave has an awesome cameo singing in a bar. Many people may find this film to be very slow and perhaps boring at times. I didn't. My one complaint is that the narration, while useful at the beginning and end of the film, is too prevalent. I would have liked to see a lot of the things it described, particularly more of Jesse's mental deterioration. On the other hand, sometimes the narration described things that were being shown on screen, making it unnecessary. Still, this didn't bother me enough to stop me from loving the movie. I recommend it for people who don't mind a slow-moving film that seeks more to enlighten than to entertain. If you really give it your time and attention, you will be rewarded.

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.