Lovingly Made But Frankly Rather Tedious – for a Theatre Movie

Rating: Null/10 (1 July 2009)

Rent The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford when you have a whole evening to spare and an entire bottle of wine to drink. I'm not saying it's a bad movie – it's not, it's pretty good – but it doesn't have a great deal of action and it's overly long, for a theatre movie. I understand it has been lovingly gleaned from the pages of a biography of James by Robert Hansen, but somewhere along the line the director and producers lost sight of what makes the difference between a good read and a good view. Or perhaps it's just that this would have worked better as a 3 episode TV mini series than as an almost three hour movie? It's the medium which is at fault here, not the message.
First, let's consider the positives; the cinematography is superb, there's no doubt about that. The whole enterprise is wonderfully filmed. The sets look authentic, the cold winter scenes look genuinely chilly, the houses are Spartan, the outdoor shots absolutely stunning. Ten out of ten for cinematography. Then there are the period details; the costumes and the accents look and sound spot on. In fact the latter are so good that occasionally I was straining to catch the dialog and had to hit the 'back' button on the DVD player to listen again to a line of speech. The performances are all very good, and the script is fine – or perhaps it's more accurate to say that it would be fine if this were a 3 episode mini series. Given that it was released to be seen in theatres, the script could have done with some pruning and tightening. This is very close to being that personal bete noir of mine - the 'Depends' movie (and you'll have to read some of my other reviews to find out what a 'Depends' movie is.)
And that brings us to the negatives; the movie is too long and too slow for all but the most dedicated fans. It's also almost exclusively a Boys Club, with the women playing very small bit parts on the periphery. That may well be an accurate representation of how women lived back then, on the periphery of the men's world, but to keep the interest of a mixed age, modern audience in a 21st century movie theatre, some effort could have been made to make the women slightly more visible, even on a domestic level. I tend to get tired pretty quickly of watching taciturn men doing manly things, even when well acted and basically factual.
The actual story, of the killing of James (Brad Pitt) by Ford (Casey Affleck), is interesting and well presented, we get the full psychological picture of the younger man, an over confident under achiever if ever there was one, smitten with his hero then, after the ultimate betrayal and shooting, sliding into a life of parody and gutlessness before being shot himself - in an act of poetic justice perhaps? The James Brothers were described as Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. After the war they took to plain old fashioned robbery; Robin Hood they were not. The movie follows the last few months of James' life from meeting Ford until the killing. We see James living life on the edge, a family man trying to blend into polite society when not out bank robbing and holding up trains, but being chased by the Pinkerton Agency, and becoming increasingly ruthless, paranoid and depressed, killing in cold blood, but constantly watching his back – literally – waiting to see which of his gang would turn him in, and picking them off one by one as the Feds move in.
It's a good story and it's well made. It's just not a theatre experience – it's a TV mini series. But of course if it had been made as a TV mini series, we wouldn't have seen Brad Pitt in the starring role, would we?