The Assassination of Jesse James

Posted by Cynical Sarah on May 28, 2008

One of America’s most romanticized bad buys is Jesse James. He was the Robin Hood of the “Old West” age of the United States and has since become one of those larger than life historical figures.

As such, many, many movies have been made about Jesse James. When I was a teen, or perhaps even a preteen, I watched Young Guns and Young Guns II and was sucked into the idea of the fun-loving Jesse James as just a misunderstood bad boy.

Every Jesse James-based movie I’ve ever seen has gone along with that same sort of idea. They were tales of adventure – more like a buddy movie with a band of men out robbing trains for fun.

That’s what I was envisioning when we picked up The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford the other day.

That may have been part of why I just didn’t like the movie. My idea of what a Jesse James movie should be and what The Assassination … was like were completely different things.

I was pretty surprised – a Jesse James movie with Brad Pitt and I didn’t enjoy it at all. I’ll tell you why, but I’ll start with the one of the few redeeming qualifies I found in the movie.

The cinematography was excellent. The color tones used in the movie as well as the lighting and the angles of some scenes were so perfect for what was needed in that certain scene that it was incredible. If it had instead been a series of still pictures telling the story rather than a movie, each scene would have been incredible.

The other good thing from the movie was the acting. As much as I prefer to think of the romanticized Jesse James, Brad Pitt does an amazing job of playing the character as more of a paranoid, depressed, outlaw.

The other major character in the story is Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck. I’m not even sure what to say about Affleck’s portrayal of the character. There’s so much depth and complexity there that there’s no simple way to describe the character.

Nothing against the other actors in the movie, but the other characters in the movie were much more stereotypical, or two-dimensional. Perhaps that was intentional to even further emphasize the complexity of Jesse James and Robert Ford in the sort of dance they end up doing through the movie.

The problem with this movie, however, was the overall storytelling. I read a book recently that was about piecing together the different “scenes” you need to write to tell the story you want to tell while writing a novel. In a way, The Assassination … seemed a lot like a movie created straight from a novel. All those scenes might be necessary to tell the full story in a book, but for a movie, it was too much.

There were so many different scenes that seemed to chop the movie into lots of little chunks to try to tell the full story. Some of those chunks could have been cut all together or perhaps ideas from those scenes could have been added to other necessary scenes instead. This movie could have easily been cut down by at least half an hour and told the same story and got the same effect.

We rented this movie after we had driven a couple hours to a little lake town where we were going to be spending a couple days just hiking and playing around town. After getting checked into the little cottage bed and breakfast place, we strolled the beach, checked out the town a little bit and headed to the main gas station where the cities only small section of video rentals was located.

We grabbed some dinner at a local pub and watched some hockey before heading back to our cottage for an early evening in watching the movie and relaxing.

Half an hour in I wasn’t sure I was even going to make it to the end of the movie. Normally I’m the one who likes the more artsy movies, but this one was just sort of boring me to tears. Then, just when you think it’s finally over, the movie just keeps going and going and going.

I wish I could recommend this one, but for once, Brad Pitt and Jesse James have let me down.

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