THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSIE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD ("ASSASSINATION," hereafter), is what you get when you put the director of photography in charge of editing. Here's a movie filled with beautiful images that linger, linger, and finally overstay their welcome. ASSASSINATION is an interesting movie. It's a beautiful movie. It could have been a great movie if it had just moved the heck along.
Casey Affleck plays Robert Ford, a man who gives Frank James the creeps just by being around, and who creeps him more the more he is around. Unfortunately, he creeps us out, too, making the seventeen hours the movie spends with the guy remarkably uncomfortable. Robert is, um, fond of Jessie in a creepily warped hero worship / deeply closeted homosexual kind of way. But Robert makes the ultimate mistake for a hero worshipper: he gets too close to the object of his admiration and learns that his hero is just a man, after all.
In the case of Brad Pitt's Jessie James, his hero isn't just a man, but an increasingly unstable psychotic who represents a danger to himself and everyone around him. Hell, by the time Ford takes his shot, it's a no-brainer. And in the moral world of the James gang, a world in which shooting a man in the back is just another day at the office, it makes perfect sense. And that works, and Pitt and Affleck are both quite good (as is the underappreciated Sam Rockwell as Robert's older brother Charley), and everything's fine, but the movie is just so damn slow.
This is a picture whose sunsets seem like they're in real time. Caterpillars mature into butterflies faster than ASSASSINATION moves along. Everything is so stately, so operatic, and for what? The murder of some other murderer? Maybe you have "get" the romance of the James Gang to "get" this movie, but all I saw was a bunch of thugs being led by a charismatic thug who eventually got what was coming to him.
No, thanks.
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