Beautiful, tedious and self-regarding

Rating: 3/10 (31 January 2009)

All right, all right, enough of the glowing reviews! three pages in, and almost every single review I've read is burning with praise for what many seem to consider a 'perfect' film. So of course I'm going to come off like a total philistine, but I don't care. I sat down to seriously absorb this film. After a very short while I was staring at the ceiling with my mouth open to catch flies, making tea, making more tea, fidgeting, picking my nails clean - anything was more tempting than sitting still and watching as the decade's most overlong and tedious 'art' film unfolded itself on the screen.
I love the American Story - particularly westerns, of most types, and of which I think this film is one: something of Budd Boetticher's with a barrel-chested Randolph Scott; black and white shoot-em-ups on high speed film accompanied by stirring strings or some warbling tenor; Joan Crawford glorious in Nicholas Ray's "Johnny Guitar"; revisionist life-with-the-Indians westerns; westerns made by Europeans (such as the VERY interesting "Eagle's Wing"); "Brokeback Mountain"; soul-searching 70s offerings such as "McCabe & Mrs Miller", "Jeremiah Johnson" and "The Outlaw Josey Wales"; and, the crowning glory, Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West". So I have, I think, an open mind, happy to give an unusual film a go. But so little happens in this film! - not just the lack of physical action - there's no inner life in these characters! They just look out of windows a lot! That's not an inner life! I couldn't wait for the end, and was relieved, and entirely unmoved, when it finally came. Despite being self-important and sententious, I didn't read into the film some crucial message about America's present sense of self. I think these kinds of films, taken from books (see also "There Will be Blood"), are the triumph of a director's hubris over experience. The magic of a book may be said to lie in being able to explore the psychological drama in the minds of the protagonists over hundreds of pages. In the immediacy of visual media, cenic shots and men looking thoughtful/vain/foolish just isn't a good enough transcription.
I don't doubt that Casey Affleck, and perhaps even Brad Pitt, are doing a very good job; but I would never recommend this film, as art, history, psychodrama, western or entertainment. Does that make me shamefully lowbrow? Oh well. For the ultimate slow-burner art film I'd watch Tartovsky's extraordinary "Nostalgia" or "Andrei Rublov", either of which knock the socks off this. Right now I'm off to watch some terrible TV movie or maybe scoff at some art.