Thursday, October 18, 2007

Elegy for an Assassin

I made a point of hitting a movie theater last night to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford last night before it vanished from those screens. As a major studio release it seemed doomed to failure by title as well as length, two hours and forty minutes. There were five to eight walk-outs last night (I think the first three had slipped in after another movie) and maybe twenty of us left when the credits rolled.

Critical reaction has generally been polarized, but fervent supporters include the legendary Andrew Sarris and a number of other more contemporary critics I can usually trust. It hasn't been a priority movie for any of my friends, even the Deadwood lovers, so I ended up going alone.

Even an acronym for the title seems too long, TAOJJBTCRF, so with your forbearance I'll just call it The Assassination.

The Assassination is nominally a Western, but it's actually in the "History as Fever Dream" genre dominated by Terrence Malick, most similarly in Days of Heaven and The New World. Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an obvious antecedent and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (interestingly enough, also one of Assassination's producers) is a future version of this genre. Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon also comes to mind, with a similar narration style although Kubrick's was a turn or two more ironic.

In lesser hands this kind of epic can fall flat, whether or not a studio messes with the cut. In the right hands, the right minds, you're not bored by the length because the filmmaker is just adjusting the pace to the times of the story, to give you a feeling of living in those spaces, those old wooden rooms, those open fields of grain and dust, to give you essentially a time travel experience.

This is the promise of the dawn of cinema. The senses enveloped, the spectator transported -- not pummeled, not ridden -- to a sociologically alien environment where men and women make different decisions than they would today, where the choices are bleakly different. History as hallucination. History as an anxious landscape, a place just barely safe enough to visit in the theater, a place you and I would want to escape to and then from. History as a seductive dream from which we are trying to awake.

The length of the movie is its vividness, its life "in the moment" whether a rolling cloud transition or a chilly evening's chat on the front porch. As is typical for movies this length, there are four acts instead of the usual three, with the first act acting as prologue: think the half hour wedding sequence opening The Godfather. The plot doesn't really begin until Sonny opens his big mouth at a meeting, but what an extended movie prologue does it to double the amount of time for planting, laying in characters and motifs that will pay off bigger in the end for enriching our involvement.

So the first forty minutes of The Assassination is prologue establishing first Jesse James in 1881, heading into his last train robbery with his older brother, Frank, both of them aware this is the end of the line, and then showing us how Robert Ford insinuates himself into the gang on the eve of the crime. Ford is the youngest of five brothers, not yet 20, and he's grown up worshiping the image of James from the dime novels he keeps hidden under his bed. We establish James' brutality. Jesse asks of Ford, "Do you want to be like me? Or do you want to BE me?"

The meat of the movie, the crisis that runs through the second and third act (i.e. 1st and 2nd act, post-prologue) is a slow-burn distillation of the segment in Goodfellas where DeNiro's character is wiping out the heist gang one-by-one. Jesse thinks he's going to be betrayed and thus ends up insuring it. Brad Pitt does a brilliant job, playing Jesse James like a rattlesnake, eyeing you suspiciously and ready to strike at any moment, unpredictably, mesmerizingly. He hits the highs and lows of Jesse's manic depression. In the most terrifying scene, he brutalizes a teenage boy without allowing him to speak, even to give him the information he wants. (Shades of Guantanamo.)

Casey Affleck is equally brilliant, taking perhaps even bigger risks, playing Robert Ford as Mark David Chapman, an ultimate fan who loses his identity in his idol, is rebuffed, and then comes back a new and deadlier man. Ford isn't stupid so much as he's clueless, an innocent who learns he needs clues, which lead him to an ultimately ignominious fate, extraordinary in how it unfolds (the final act, a fourth that plays like a traditional third).

I found myself constantly in the thrall of the movie, a world that for its more measured pace is no less lethal than ours if not moreso. It's the anxious version of a John Ford historical western, a Liberty Valance or My Darling Clementine on a hair-trigger. For all the open vistas, when the men in the longcoats approach the house with rifles there's no place to run. When the bandits rob the train they shower the air with gunfire, pop-pop-popping away recklessly until the passengers are cowed, and then starting up again just when nerves have settled.

It's also a land of scarcity. Less people, less money, less food. Two-story housing developments on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Tense journeys through the wilderness. Stark codes of behavior even among thieves.

The lensing, by longtime Coen Brothers cinematographer, Roger Deakens, is superb, Oscar material. The supporting cast performs brilliantly, capturing nuances of class and intelligence, just what exactly such endeavors would attract, most notably Sam Rockwell as brother Charlie Ford, the iconographic Sam Shepard, now with sagging eyelids to match his long mustache, Deadwood's Garret Dillahunt and Paul Schneider as other gang members. Mary-Louise Parker in a sort of high-class cameo plays Zee James, Jesse's wife, and while her lines are few, she makes the most of her biggest moment. Nick Cave leads the scoring and appears as a Bowery saloon minstrel, again with the same preternatural understanding of darkest Western history that he provided to The Proposition. All of this is tribute to New Zealand-born director/screenwriter Andrew Dominik, who's only previous film credit is Chopper, another criminal character study and the movie that introduced Eric Bana to the world.

Only in the last act, the last ten minutes of the movie slipping through your fingers like the final pages of an enrapturing novel, do we learn why the movie's title is so accurate. This is history writ large in the typeface of the era. This is epic made sharp and cutting by sociology. This is a movie that you live in for two and two-thirds hours so it can live in you indefinitely, sharpening its questions as you turn it like a bauble in your hand.

There's only one other recent release I can think of in its class, this kind of adult epic American storytelling in the vivid ribbon of dreams form, and that's David Fincher's Zodiac. It's another film that did not find its audience the first time on the big screen, one that would benefit for an old-fashioned movie revival house system, but hopefully now with DVD. Another very adult film about men and the temperature of their souls, told through their fluctuations moment-to-moment, yet over a grand and inevitable landscape.

There's a central image in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford that recurs throughout the picture, that of the chair. In a moment of suburban respite, Jesse sits in a dining room chair set out in a backyard of overgrown, wheat-like grass. He proffers snakes like Cleopatra, live and as food. That chair is his throne and he is kingly in bearing, the kingly sociopath. With no television, no telephone, the chairs are where you sat and talked, hour after hour, and when we see an empty chair that Jesse has inhabited, there in a spartan room, we still feel his presence. Somebody has sat there, a number of others over time, the chain enduring without pity but their ghosts left behind by the furniture as reminder.

It's the sweet yearning of history. All that we witnessed. All that we missed.

All that is long gone, forever.

3 comments:

Devoted Reader in Delmar said...

Brilliant writing/review.

Reeko Deeko said...

This is just a stunning review, Netter. You missed your calling as a film critic. Your intelligence and semiotics background serve your passion for story and image beautifully. THIS is why I read Nettertainment every day. (One small note: Check your dates, you have JJ in 1981-just a typo).
Love, love, love it and you.
es

Mark Netter said...

Thanks for the kind words and especially for the proofing note. Now corrected.