Venice. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

"A ravishing, magisterial, poetic epic that moves its characters toward their tragic destinies with all the implacability of a Greek drama, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is one of the best Westerns of the 1970s, which represents the highest possible praise," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

"It's a magnificent throwback to a time when filmmakers found all sorts of ways to refashion Hollywood's oldest and most durable genre.... Whether it directly resembles them or not, this impeccable new picture is at one with the adventurous spirit that produced such films as McCabe & Mrs Miller, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Bad Company, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Jeremiah Johnson, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Days of Heaven, The Long Riders and, yes, Heaven's Gate, rather than with anything being made today."

Kirk Honeycutt offers a dissenting opinion in the Hollywood Reporter: "The self-indulgence begins with director Andrew Dominik and infects much of the cast, who deliver meandering, unstable performances. Instead of contemplating the moral dimensions of novelist Ron Hansen's portrait of outlaw paranoia and obsession, a viewer can only think of waste - the waste of good material and themes, a talented cast and, most crucially, the viewer's own time."

"This is a major 'art western' of the first order - one of the most immaculate and uncannily 'right' time-machine visits into a bygone world ever put to the screen," writes Jeffrey Wells. "As far from a post-modern shoot-em-up as you can get and not even a contender in the ways of the rousing, rip-snortin' Wild Bunch, this is one of those awesomely assembled visitations that just sinks in like a sunovabitch."

Update: "The most pretentious title of the decade is now the most pretentious studio release in a decade!!!" exclaims David Poland all the way from Telluride. "Andrew Dominik, who made the raw, gritty, irresistible Chopper just seven years ago, got his hands on DVDs of Terrence Malick's films, Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller, Cimino's Heaven's Gate, Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and a few other nouveau westerns and picked his very favorite parts, took Warner Bros' $50 million, and the passion of Brad Pitt (which I would never mock in any way, though it as led to some terrible choices), and a cadre of very good actors and made one of the most obnoxiously taste-free stews imagineable. And I don't just think this because it is yet another half-ass attempt to do what The Proposition did on a miniscule budget and some really well crafted ideas."

Update, 9/2: At In the Company of Glenn, Mark Salisbury proclaims, "it is, alongside David Fincher's Zodiac, the best American film of the year." Glenn Kenny adds: "A lot of the early word on the picture tossed around the description 'Malickean,' but it's not quite that - for one thing, it is a 100-percent narrative film with a very strong - what is it they call it? - through line."

Updates, 9/3: "Stirring, nuanced and elegaic, Andrew Dominik's retelling of Jesse James's legend is equal parts a mentor-acolyte love story, a melancholy neo-Western and a tragedy of betrayal with Biblical echoes," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily. "Ravishingly shot in an autumn-to-winter pallette by Roger Deakins and featuring a mesmeric central performance by Casey Affleck, solidly supported (whatever the poster says) by Brad Pitt, this is a mature, meticuolous work."

"Like another project that lingered in post-production for a long time, Fincher's Zodiac, Dominik's film is not so much interested in the crimes themselves as he is in the people committing them," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "Both films also start off with an impressively staged crime scene almost as if to simply get it out of the way before moving on to a fascinating investigation of the people associated with the crime. Unlike Zodiac, however, Dominik's film also has a clear and even famous ending, and the titular act of violence is easily the best scene in the entire film, radiating a kind of unavoidable fatality that elevates the lethal gunshot from a just another bang to a very strong sense of epochal change (also due to the expert build-up to this crucial point)."

Updates, 9/4: For the Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm, Affleck's is "the best performance in a film that's frequently impressive, sometimes dull but about as far from the other movie approximations of the story as it is possible to get."

"For me, this is a masterpiece, plain and simple," reiterates Mark Salisbury at In the Company of Glenn. "Pitt should be applauded for not only his fine performance but for being his director's 800-pound gorilla, and for making sure this got made the way Dominik (who was born in New Zealand, but grew up in Australia) wanted it. Ten word title and all."

Update, 9/5: "The brilliant irony of Andrew Dominik's film is that Jesse James is a man who is balled and chained by his own infamy," writes James Christopher in the London Times. "A little judicious cutting would not go amiss. Even so, this is a beautiful parable about fame and murder."

Updates, 9/10: "There are moments of scary intensity, when characters stare in the face of death by the friendly fire of betrayal," writes Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. "But the air of metafiction, of a legend that knows it's a legend and hints that its participants knew (a cinematic strain begun by Bonnie and Clyde, when the selfconsciousness was fresh), becomes arch and a little wearing."

In the Los Angeles Times, John Horn talks with Dominik.

---

Covering the coverage: Venice 07. Index.

---

Posted by dwhudson at September 1, 2007 7:06 AM