Written and Directed by Andrew Dominik

Adapted from the novel by Ron Hansen

Review by Brenda Varda

 

The name Jesse James evokes the epitome of the outlaw antihero – a reckless legend, with a supernatural talent for crime. When associated with a film, the name promises the fast shooting territory of American Westerns, a romp with guns and Clint Eastwood-style violence in a dirty, rough wasteland. But The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) is not a modernized amphetamine trip that mythologizes or demonizes the man. Instead, writer-director Andrew Dominik’s film, an adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel of the same name, provides a long, slow, psychological unveiling of multiple complex characters in an uneasy world. Triggers are rarely pulled. This Jesse takes its time.

 

At two hours and forty-seven minutes, the movie is a contemplation of both Jesse’s final acceptance of death and his protégé Robert’s tortured attempt at claiming fame; it is a meditation without customary resolution, an exploration without a dictate. There are the traditional dramatic elements of sorrow, fear, regret, retribution, but they play out in circles of human confusion, with glances and regrets pushed up against each other in a field of disassembled intentions. Threat and insecurity multiply in scenes that subtly push the plot, but also that reveal psychological dysfunction in Caravaggesque interiors and wide, Andrew Wyeth-like landscapes.

 

Slow is not the territory of the commercial U.S. film: average shot lengths in American cinema have steadily decreased from between 5 to 9 seconds in the 1970s to between 4 and 6 seconds in the 1990s. (The Cinemetrics Database at has the complete stats on time and shots of almost 10,000 films from the early 1900’s to now. You can also download the software and contribute to the collection.) In more recent films, images flicker by in under 2 second cuts. T.V., commercials and the internet dole out even shorter segments, so that our common visual diet is in nibbles, not even bites.

 

Jesse James’ average shot length is 6.8 seconds (with a standard deviation of 6.3), more than three times the length common in action films (for instance, The Bourne Ultimatum has an ASL of 2.1 seconds, with a standard deviation of 1.8). Even this average shot length is deceptive; director Dominik creates full scenes that are way over the average 2 to 3 minute movie length, often letting the audience steep for five to ten minutes in atmospheres and relationships that twist with Jesse’s approaching demise. This slow rhythm continues in the surprising aftermath following James’ death – no surprise because of the long and explicit (and perhaps) slow title.

 

About halfway through this searingly beautiful and measured film, Jesse James (Brad Pitt) returns unexpectedly to the gang’s hideout for an as yet unannounced reason. Jesse doesn’t know it, but in his absence, Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) has shot his trusted cousin in defense of Dick Liddle, another gang member. There are too many smiles and Jesse senses a lie: the game is on. The prolonged dinner scene lasts almost ten minutes, tripping through Jesse’s paranoia, Charley Ford’s (Sam Rockwell) awkward stabs at levity, and Robert Ford’s attempts at dissembling while at the same time proving his delusional devotion to Jesse. The dialogue is romantic, elevated, colloquial and poetic; the scene does not end so much as progress through levels of discomfort, with Jesse’s wariness meeting Ford’s bumbling and determined efforts to hide the truth.

The acting too progresses at a slower-than-normal rate. Pitt, Affleck, and Rockwell are allowed to exist in a transformational space, their faces and eyes under examination at a pace that emphasizes discontinuities and questions—both in the character and in the mind of the audience. The film requires a level of thinking that allows time for uncertainty, rather than the usual fast response. Likewise, cinematographer Roger Deakins, a favorite of the Coen Brothers, helps Dominik create an evocative, oneiric world that lets time meander, employing a painterly aesthetic that mimics old photographs and creates time lapses of ominous skies. Underneath this moving visual strategy, the delicate, brooding score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis reinforces the sorrowful passage of time.

 

Many of the reviews following the film’s release in 2007 were glowing, almost religious hymns to this epic and to the director, the cinematographer, and the actors: it was a critics’ favorite (except for those that couldn’t tolerate the length and narration…) Even when questioning the film’s commercial audience appeal, most lauded this as a brave and defiant creation, an eloquent re-visioning of the myth. Casey Affleck was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and many see this as one of Brad Pitt’s best roles. It seems that the only missing piece in these tributes is more than a mention of the source material: not Jesse James himself, but Ron Hansen’s novel. Written in 1993, and a nominee for the Pen/Faulkner award, the book is a template for the film’s pace and detail. If one reads the book after seeing the film, the pages are an exercise in visual recall and provocation. In an interview with Nick Dawson for Filmmaker magazine, Dominik recalls picking up the novel second-hand, and being entranced by “the sheer density of detail” in what “seemed like a fully-formed, hermetically-sealed world, one that around the Jesse-Robert mental duel (see more at "Last Man Standing," By Nick Dawson, Filmmaker Magazine, IFP March 24, 2012). Dominik faithfully translated Hansen’s excruciating detail into every component of the film: the psychology, environment, history, and tone. Little of the pictorial and character description that saturate the book are on the actual pages of the movie script, but every background composition and sideways glance is informed by Hansen’s historical accuracy and imagination. (see Andrew Dominik's unedited screenplay, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This is an early version of the script, dated December 8, 2004.)

 

The novel too is ‘slow’, an accumulation of fact, description, fantasy, and interaction that plays out Jesse’s past and present in scenes that alternate between expanded recreations of source material and environmental detail. Although the movie cannot reveal Hansen’s full scope, it plays on the discontinuities of Jesse’s past as a soldier, renegade, husband, father and killer, and paints a complex picture. With both the book and film, the reader or viewer must interpret discontinuous detail, find their own truth, and deliberate a messy human landscape: there is room for the mind. This slowness leads, of course, to introspection, and occasional drifts into speculation, but also to gasps, laughter, revelation, and delight. Slow does not eliminate reaction.

 

There are other popular films in this slow realm: for instance, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terrence Malick’s recent Tree of Life and Michael Haneke’s 2009 The White Ribbon all emphasize a measured negotiation with time. There are many that criticize this genre of “slow cinema,” deeming it foreign, pretentious or boring. But slow like this can be liberating, a resistance to a hyper-time culture that demands constant change and instantaneous awareness.

 

Just like these other slow movies, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford denies many common tropes such as neat endings, the efficacy of a hero, the certainty of morality or the surety of existence. After Jesse dies, these very questions are highlighted in the most surreal sequence of the film: Robert Ford, a dubious and marked hero, goes on to recreate the killing in a touring stage production, one that echoes and reinterprets the James saga. Robert and his brother Charley reenact Jesse’s killing again and again in a play that twists the intention, meaning and outcome for the theatre audience. This heightened reflection of the characters, the actors, the time, and the spectators plays out in an uncomfortable and infinite replay, one that eventually drives Charley insane and leaves Robert Ford with an emptiness that he never can fill. Time is again manipulated, in this instance as a satiric reverie before the closing scenes of the film.

 

This theatrical coda provides the perfect final meditation. Most commercial movies end soon after the final action: there is little lingering on the denouement or explication of the characters’ post-climax existence. But in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the slowness and the attention to the novel’s intent allow an unusual relationship to the aftermath of the anti-hero, a delicate exploration of consequences. ‘Slow’, in this instance, moves the audience past normal expectation, and creates sensations and images that linger long after Jesse and Bob have both met their ends.

 

 

Brenda Varda, a Los Angeles playwright and composer, teaches writing and theatre at Art Center College of Design, the New York Film Academy, and University of California. Her works include Fables du Theatre, Reactor: simple, clean, efficient, and Things That Fall From the Sky. She also teaches creative writing and organizes events through Wordspace, a local literary organization.