Saturday, May 24, 2008
Two days after watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, here's another movie with an absurdly long title.
This is the third and best James Gang themed movie I've watched in the last few months, after Walter Hill's The Long Riders and Samuel Fuller's I Shot Jesse James. Long Riders was really a highly fictionalized, slightly romanticized version that is basically an action movie, where Robert Ford is barely a footnote (in fact, Charlie Ford gets probably 4 times the dialogue Robert does). I Shot Jesse James, however, covers a lot of the same material as Assassination (god, even typing just the first word seems long), so it's worth comparing, because the movies could hardly be more different.
Both focus on Robert Ford as the lead character, and the build up to his murder of Jesse, and how his life subsequently falls apart. Shot is a brisk hour and twenty minutes, while Assassination is a hearty two hours and forty. Both have scenes where Ford is in a bar and someone sings a song about "the Coward Robert Ford" and he does not react well. Both movies show Ford joining a stage show where he re-enacts Jesse's murder every night, although Assassination has his brother Charlie playing the role of Jesse on-stage. But even though they tell the same stories, they aren't much alike. Shot has Jesse get killed within the first 20 minutes, and the rest of the movie is about Ford's decent into guilt. Assassination doesn't get to the shooting until about two hours in, and more focuses on the relationship between Ford and James.
The main difference in films is the treatment of Ford and James' characters. In Shot, I think Ford is maybe a little more sympathetic... he kills Jesse in a cowardly way, but he thinks he's doing it for the right reasons, and then spends the rest of his life feeling guilty. Jesse James isn't in it long, but comes off as a nice guy. In Assassination, Ford is a bizarre, awkward creep who is infatuated with James (maybe in love with him?) and tries to insinuate himself in James' life... he's the wild west version of a celebrity stalker. And James is seen as a violent, paranoid sociopath, prone to weird mood swings where one minute he's your best friend, and the next he's leading you out into the woods to shoot you. But what's really weird here is that the movie suggests that James is suicidal, or at least attracted to danger. It's clear that he sees through Ford, sees his obsession and the danger he presents, yet keeps him around any way. And then, in a subtle but unmistakable way, he more or less invites Ford to shoot him while his back is turned.
I don't want to mince words here: I thought Assassination was a great movie. It is easily the greatest western since Unforgiven, although it doesn't feel much like a western. It's dark, brooding and complex, and possibly the best looking movie that came out last year. Sure, pretty looking open landscapes are a staple in westerns, but I don't think we've ever seen a train robbery scene like the one here, where mysterious figures slowly crawl out of the dark of night, and the steam rolls out of the engine like smoke coming out of the gates of hell.
I've always liked Brad Pitt, and he gives one his best performances here, and I think we'd all be fawning over his work if it wasn't for just how great Casey Affleck is. Affleck steals the movie, and given the strength of Pitt's work, that's no mean feat. Affleck is just so unnerving and pathetic here... he has this deliberate way of speaking where you realize that Ford must practice in his head what he wants to say to Jesse ahead of time, trying to attain some sort of fantasy ideal of their life together. He's awful and creepy, but like Travis Bickle he's so helpless and pathetic that you have a sick kind of pity for him, even if he is the 1800's Mark David Chapman.
If I have one complaint, the movie may overuse its narration, which I'm guessing comes from the book. A few times the narrator basically describes things that we can clearly understand from the visuals. For the most part it works... it's even necessary, for example, during the ending, when Ford is unceremoniously murdered by a man he never met. Still, they could have cut it down in a few places, and trusted the images to tell the story. It reminded me a bit of Terrence Mallick with The New World or The Thin Red Line where you just want the narration to stop so you can focus on the beautiful images.
I think a while back I lauded 3:10 to Yuma for being a straightforward western, and complained that I was maybe a little tired of revisionist/elegiac westerns. Well, this one is certainly not a traditional western, so I'll go ahead and eat my words and say that I was wrong, this beats the pants off a typical traditional western.
No comments:
Post a Comment