The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

"Westerns are the stories we used to tell ourselves about our origins, about the sources of our native pluck and resilience," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "They were part of the messy, improvisational process by which Americans define — and revise, and define again — a national self-image, and one of the many reasons to regret the demise of westerns is that without them it's just a little tougher for us to figure out who we are.... Is it safe to say that the national mood has darkened in the last six years?" The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford "doesn't know quite how to feel about either of its main characters, except that each, in his different way, is something of a con artist, and that each, also in a different way, is an extremely sad man."

Updated through 9/25.

This is "is a deeply, unsentimentally nostalgic movie - but nostalgic for what exactly?" asks J Hoberman in the Voice. "Gritty but mythic, a dirty western with clean shirts, oblique in some ways and obvious in others, Jesse James is a bold, even wacky, reinvention. This is a psychological chamber drama in which the wide-open spaces are geographic as well as mental."

"Not content to be poetic, it aims squarely for Poetry and imbues its simple sonnet of a story with the heft of an ancient song," writes David Lowery. "And by and large it works, and works beautifully, running through a gamut of contrasts - mythic and intimate, grandiose yet delicate - and binding them with a deep sense of melancholy."

"It's beautifully shot and acted, but languidly paced in a way that blunts most of the movie's emotional impact," finds Matt Singer at IFC News, where R Emmet Sweeney offers a history of the legendary outlaw on screen: "Jesse James has gone through infamy, idolization, deconstruction and dissolution in the Hollywood system. With his genre moribund and his legend fading, it might be time for the James myth to take a break."

"Similar problems plague this Brad Pitt vehicle that did last week's 3:10 to Yuma but they move in opposite directions from a base misunderstanding of their genre, and its current demands," writes Ryland Walker Knight at Vinyl Is Heavy. "Andrew Dominik's Jesse James picture tries so hard to be special it can only fail to live up to its amplified flamboyance; James Mangold's 3:10 remake is so flat it never gets going, even with a barn-burning at the opening. Or: one tries to re-invent the wheel with borrowed gimmicks while the other tries to fasten the wheel back in place with worn (however trusty) tools at hand."

It's likely the most 'difficult' film produced with Hollywood money and starring an A-list star since Eyes Wide Shut," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It demands repeat viewings, and as such, it'll either be a massive commercial failure, or it'll touch off a new wave of American cinephilia."

"The Assassination is first and foremost a meditation on American myths and the nature of fame," writes Matt Riviera. "Unfolding like a Greek tragedy, it examines the debilitating impact of violence on the killer's soul and its parallel, opposite effect on his reputation. It also charts the transition from a time when one's exploits were widely celebrated, to an era when one could be famous simply for being famous."

"Among the large supporting cast members, James Carville, the liberal media spokesman and the brains behind Bill Clinton's two victorious presidential elections, startled me at first in the role of Missouri's Governor Crittenden, the mortal enemy of Jesse James, but I was quickly won over by his unquiveringly straight-faced actorish zeal," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "For my money, Mr Carville is more than a match for Fred Thompson of Law and Order and the Republican Presidential Sweepstakes, but there is always the possibility that I am politically prejudiced."

"It walks like a classic cowboy movie but talks like a graphic novel, possessing the former's baroque mythology but the latter's revisionist empathy for the marginal," writes Jason Bogdaneris in the L Magazine.

Logan Hill talks with Casey Affleck for New York.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

"Throughout, Dominik indulges in a level of self-consciousness and artifice so pronounced that his film stands not as a historical record or even a slice of neo-western revisionism so much as a contemplative mood piece-by-way-of-character study intent on examining the nature of hero worship, capturing the tumultuousness of the West's transition from gritty reality to fabled past, and deconstructing the era's myths even as it upholds them," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "As with 2007's other great American work, David Fincher's Zodiac, Dominik's triumph focuses on an iconic criminal from the country's past, and the way in which that personage, refracted through the media's filter, epitomized our love-hate rapport with fame. Moreover, it shares with Fincher's film a detail-oriented fascination with procedure, albeit not that of the police or the newspaper, but of fate itself, the director languorously, purposefully depicting the titular act as the culmination of a carefully arranged series of events that could lead to only one, fateful outcome."

Updates, 9/20: "Epic and intimate, brutal and poignant, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford aims higher than practically any other American film this year and hits the target with aplomb," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"The entire film is a conceit," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "It signals Dominik's intention to reproduce the now-vaunted postmodern aspects of 70s moviemaking—those great westerns by Peckinpah, Aldrich, Altman, Penn and Hill. Yet, while recalling the comically extended title of Robert Altman's great 1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Or Sitting Bull's History Lesson - where Altman used Paul Newman's star power to analyze the beauty and terror of American showbiz and gangster legend - Dominik stops short of true revisionism. He uses Brad Pitt's iconography without the inquiring skepticism of Altman's satire. Instead, Dominik merely swoons over Pitt/Jesse, entrapped by macho mystique."

Updates, 9/21: "The lachrymose new film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford adds another gauzy chapter to the overtaxed James myth, if not much rhyme or reason, heart or soul," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"A narrator, his voice floating toward us from the great beyond, describes the action as we're seeing it, on the off-chance we're suffering from temporary blindness," notes Stephanie Zacharek, offering a few painful-sounding examples in Salon. The film "represents a breakthrough in the moviegoing experience. It may be the first time we've been asked to watch a book on tape." Similarly, Gwynne Watkins at Nerve.

"It happened with regularity in the 70s, but every once in a while, a major studio accidentally produces a work of art like The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford - a dark, iconoclastic Western that lacks clear heroes and villains, tucks its only shoot 'em up sequence in the opening reel, and closes on a note of profound ambiguity and regret," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "In look and tone, it recalls moody revisionist Westerns like McCabe & Mrs Miller and The Shooting, but with a special attentiveness to the natural world that's closer to Terrence Malick. But perhaps its closest antecedent is Walter Hill's underrated Wild Bill, another story of an outlaw who had the misfortune of being a legend before his death, thus inviting fame-seekers to strike him down. Both films derive a sick sort of tension from the inevitable, as their paranoid anti-heroes wait for an end that they seem to know is coming."

For the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan, this is "a film whose reach exceeds its grasp. Hugely ambitious and not without moments of success, this indulgent 2 hour and 40 minute epic ends up as unwieldy as its elongated title. It's a movie in love with itself, and few things are more fatal than that." Also: Susan King's history of Jesse James on the screen.

"The mere phrase 'Brad Pitt as Jesse James' makes for a kind of mini-reflection on the evolution of celebrity culture," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "It's a shame that The Assassination... never goes much deeper than that tag line."

"I was hoping for a chance to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford a second time before I wrote my review, but only to confirm my suspicions that it's a surprising near-masterpiece, certainly one of the year's best films, and the best Western to come across the range since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1996)," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "I had been looking forward to the film, mainly because 2007 had previously yielded two very good Westerns in Seraphim Falls and 3:10 to Yuma (we'll say nothing more about the wretched September Dawn). I had also admired New Zealand director Andrew Dominik's previous and only other feature, Chopper (2000). But none of this prepared me for the scope, artistry and brilliance of this new film."

Update, 9/24: "It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

Updates, 9/25: "I like the movie a lot. He had such reverence - or fidelity, at least - to my words that I couldn't help but love it," novelist Ron Hansen tells Paul Wilner in the LAT.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson: "When I spoke to Dominik on the phone in Los Angeles, there was a great awareness that the ultimate fate of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - whether it end up a seminal film, or simply a footnote in history - was still very much in the balance."

Posted by dwhudson at September 19, 2007 6:24 AM