The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

As its fulsome title suggests, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford wants very badly to be an art western, in the vein of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (a film it consciously emulates—it’s even got Nick Cave doing the Bob Dylan thing, providing the score and playing a bit part). In fact, director Andrew Dominik’s languorous account of Jesse James’s demise after his last train robbery with the James Gang was at the mercy of Warner Bros. for about a year. (Dominik wanted it to be longer, more Terrence Malick–esque; the studio, naturally, wanted it to be punchier.) The final result indicates Jesse James would have remained the same no matter how it was sliced. Even the masterful cinematography by Coen Brothers collaborator Roger Deakins seems put on—a stately, sublime gloss on Dominik’s rather unremarkable script. Casey Affleck is best as Ford, whose twitchy, sycophantic, vaguely homoerotic relationship with James (Brad Pitt) gives the film a modicum of complexity. Pitt is satisfactorily menacing (he’s never looked so louche and anemic, Interview With the Vampire included), but mostly comes off as a stolid prop. And the film is still too long. Its climax—which the Brechtian title, of course, spoils—is followed by a protracted story of Ford’s own downfall: a cumbersome coda on the bittersweetness of fame that simply wallows in irony, as if the device had never been used in a western before. SKIP IT

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.).