THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD Review

Posted by Todd Brown at 12:49am.

Posted in Film & DVD Reviews .

[This one comes to us from a super secret undercover reviewer who must remain anonymous to avoid incurring the wrath of local publicists who don’t want anybody talking about the film yet even though the word is already out thanks to high profile festival appearances which makes the whole mebargo thing rather silly, really. Ooooh, mysterious!]

With a running time almost as long as its title, and a production history as tumultuous as the life of Jesse James himself, there are a lot of reasons to hate THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. It’s a Western. It stars Brad Pitt who has gone from being a good actor to being arm candy. It stars Casey Affleck who’s the brother of some actor named something-or-other Affleck who was supposed to have been big once. Also, there’s Sam Shepherd who is about as convincing onscreen as Madonna. It’s based on a book, and to add injury to insult there’s a narrator who reads the book to you in a voice over.

So it’s like a little Christmas present that it’s actually as good as it is. Little Casey Affleck plays Robert Ford, a sort of twitchy fanboy who, if he was alive today, would go to the San Diego Comic Con, sidle up to the urinal and babble to Mark Waid about continuity errors in THE FLASH. Except that in this movie there is no San Diego Comic Con nor is there a Mark Waid so instead he straps on a borrowed gun and blows holes through peoples’ heads. Brad Pitt plays Jesse James, the legendary outlaw, but really he’s playing Brad Pitt, acting exactly like Brad Pitt does only minus Angelina and the Brood. He’s charming one minute, then totally a dick the next, completely paranoid and suspicious that everyone is out to get him, prone to carrying a gun just like a celebrity (see: Harry Conick Jr, Tommy Lee Jones, Martin Lawrence) and using it to shoot fish (well, Phil Spector used his gun to shoot a nice young lady, but you get the point) and even slicing off the heads of some snakes and eating them, which is big in Hollywood these days. They call it the new Botox.

The plot is about Robert Ford shooting Jesse James, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who makes it through the title (spoiler!), and by the time the movie is finished you feel very smart, almost like you’ve just listened to a book on tape, only in JESSE JAMES there are lots of shots of people’s heads exploding like big cans of Chef Boyardee and there’s a sexy fan dancer and Brad Pitt takes his clothes off so it’s much better than a book on tape anyways (except for the book on tape of TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: DEFENDING FREEDOM COLLECTION, which is very exciting).

Let other people praise Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt, but for me the star of the movie is Sam Rockwell who hasn’t had a hit movie since CHARLIE’S ANGELS back in 2000 and who doesn’t love the underdog? Rockwell plays Robert Ford’s brother, Charley Ford, and the social situations in which he finds himself are so awkward (am I going to get shot in the middle of supper for that joke?) that your heart goes out to him. All he wants is for everyone to stop shooting each other in the head and just get along for once, maybe sing some songs or something, but no one ever obliges because they’re having too much fun shooting each other in the head. You want to buy him a self-confidence course and a guide to manners so he can smooth out all the tension in the room with a few well-placed bon mots.

Ultimately, what’s most amazing about JESSE JAMES is that it’s got stealth quality. This is one of them movies that sneaks up on you. You really don’t notice how good it is because your butt is numb, you keep seeing pictures of clouds racing by and that voice over keeps punching a hot needle through your eardrums. It’s only in the final scene when you’re all distracted about the things that’re eating at you, when the movie jumps you from exactly the direction you weren’t looking in. It clubs you over the head with a baseball bat and dislodges your brain, cracks your skull and gives your heart an enormous pinch with a pair of red-hot pliers. It’s the best feeling in the world. It means you just saw a good movie.