deep hero

Rating: Null/10 (12 June 2016)

The movie "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" is an indefinable movie creating extreme reactions after being watched. The terms describing it would vary from mesmerizing or deep to plain lackluster. The reactions can be justified if the traits of this iconoclastic work are considered. It's a western lacking the elements of western movies. It's a drama but at the same time includes few features of a comedy. Although the movie can be rightly identified with any of these genres, it's quite perceptible that limiting it to any of the given genres would be unjust.
But the astonishing feat achieved by the director is beyond that since the prominence of the movie is revealed to the audience through characterization. The trap in which the movie shrewdly avoided being entangled was delving deep into the psyches of the characters and the transmutation undergone by them. The historical aspect of this depiction is just a façade of the story which is given out to the audience from the outset in the title. The movie succeeds in conflating the characteristics of the characters so as the cowardice of Robert Ford and the courage in Jesse James wouldn't have been comprehended without each other. It seemed as if the glorification granted on James was realized through the pusillanimity depicted by Robert Ford since he stood for the opposite of whatever the other one possessed.
History has no way other than being biased on the side of the narrator for it is being told by a person. A person with a general tendency of the mind. This tendency can be modified but never eliminated since the narrator lives in a specific time with specific standards and moral codes. So, to put it in a nutshell, the narrated history can never be the real one because it is conveyed by the people already familiarized not only with the story but also with the idea of other people on the incident. The movie is well-aware of that and its attempt to negate the bias and didacticism implied in the story is twofold. First, the language used in the voice-over narration is literary and book-like unlike the everyday language of the characters. This contrast is an evident effort of the director reminding the audience of the storification of the incident. Second, the dream like scenes provided with blurry margins of the screen added to the elements of the untrustworthy narration since they were represented as memories. Masood Abdollahi