A poorly directed film forgetting the most essential ingredient of any film, story.

Rating: 2/10 (24 October 2007)

"The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" is a poorly directed film forgetting the most essential ingredient of any film, story. Andrew Dominik tries to develop rich characters, but sadly these portraits fall flat, because they are neither interesting nor consistent and do not develop over the course of the film.
Although the actors are all brilliant in their own right, they are not directed in this film at all. In certain scenes they occasionally are overacting or in some cases under acting; yelling, brooding and crying if not earned by the story fail to communicate anything and come across as fake.
Dominik doesn't create any emotional connect and/or bond between his audience and his characters. There is no story for us to follow the characters, therefore we are not rooting for them or against them, but merely observing them. Furthermore their reactions to things that would seem to be rather emotional are completely absent.
For instance the scene when Robert Ford shoots Wood Hite in the head, everyone, including Ford's sister barely even blinks. There is no question that these are hard times and hard living people, but this very important plot point, the murder of Jesse James's cousin is treated with barely any reaction at all at the time of the shooting.
Later in the film Jesse James shows up unannounced at the Ford household and now Dominik would have us believe that they are very nervous about the recent shooting, but whilst it happened no one reacted, except for Robert Ford's crooked smile as if he had done something special.
The last twist in this sub-plot is that it never turns out to be anything. It is never discussed again, except for an unusual scene when Jesse James questions Charley Ford, "do you have anything to confess"? To which Charley Ford says "no". After that it is never brought up again and seemingly forgotten in the confusing tapestry of the film. It is all just too inconsistent and in a two-hour plus long film things have to be consistent and motivated if the director would like us to follow and care about the story.
The real question is do we the cinema going public care about the characters? No. They do not change nor evolve, but remain the same opportunistic (Robert Ford), morose (Jesse James), and ignorant (the gang) bunch. There is no journey.
As for the story itself it is disconnected, jumping around and missing throughout much of the film. Characters like Ed Miller, Dick Liddil and Jim Cummins seem important for a moment, but who are they? Why are they important? What do they add to the intrigue of the story? All these questions remain a mystery. Finally when the story focuses on Robert Ford and Jesse James's relationship (indeed there is a brief moment at the beginning, but it like much of the story is misplaced) the film is over an hour old and everything is so disconnected that barely anything makes sense.
Another absolute failure of the film is the narration. The use of narration in the film is case and point of how it is cannot be employed as a substitute for story. The narration tries to fill in the gaps of story, but effectively does nothing except try desperately to sound poetic. Films are meant to be image driven, not by their voice over. If a story cannot be told with images then it should be written down and published not filmed. Worse still is when the narration tells us what we are seeing. In the scene just before Robert Ford kills Jesse James we follow the character through the house and the narration provides us a play by play of what we can already see. It never delves any deeper into the inner thoughts or workings of the characters. It fails completely to provide us any insight into what our characters are thinking. In fact one or two of the rare times when the acting and story are in our harmony and about to earn an emotional moment the narration arrives to spoil the scene. It is surprising how bad the narration in the film is and furthermore how awfully timed it is.
As for the cinematography, Roger Deakins has done an excellent job. Of course their is the over use of several gimmicks. Such as the reoccurring distorted focus, but that can hardly be blamed on Deakins as much on the stylistic choices of director. There are several shots in the film where one feels that director is so in love with his shots that he cannot cut them our in spite of the fact that they do nothing for the story. A perfect example of this is the arrival of the train at Blue Cut; smoke, darkness, one light and all. These shots although stunningly photographed, like the acting feel forced and without motivation. It is there because it is beautiful not because it adds anything to the story.
Rather than belabor the point about the film's poor direction, I suggest any reader interested in a great character piece, full of hope, story and emotion go and see "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (French title, which is the original, "Le Scaphandre et le papillon") directed by Julian Schanbel. This is one of the finest directed films in the past 10 years. It has already been released in France and is slated to be out in the States on November 30th. The first 15 minutes of this film are truly brilliant, because Schanbel masterfully puts us, the audience in the skin of the character Jean-Dominique Bauby. Thus linking our fate as the viewer to that of his main character's. It is a true triumph in film-making.