Brad Pitt, international superstar, steps into the spurs of Jesse James, the notorious outlaw who once rivaled Mark Twain for title of World’s Most Famous American. Jesse James was the stuff of tall-tales, his gang’s goings-on grist for the myth mill. But don’t expect any showdowns, shootouts, or cops & robber chases from this revisionist Western. Adapted from Catholic novelist Ron Hansen’s book of the same name, Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a snail-paced psychological drama—heavy on the psychology, light on the drama.

The elements are all in place for a good, possibly great, movie: spare, poetic dialogue delivered by well-cast actors (always nice to see Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, and the especially excellent Garret Dillahunt); lyrical, atmospheric cinematography by Oscar-nominated Roger Deakins; evocative soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; and an interesting story featuring larger-than-life characters and melancholic themes.

So why do the elements not combine to make a great movie? There’s probably a long way of answering that question and a short way. Unlike the movie, I’ll opt for the shorter route. At two hours and forty minutes, Assassination is as slow as molasses in January. Though meditatively paced, it’s never clear what exactly the filmmakers are meditating on. America’s unhealthy obsession with outlaws? The exacting price of fame and notoriety? The disillusionment of hero-worship? The nature of betrayal? The complicated motivations and meanings behind an apparent act of cowardice?

Andrew Dominik, directing only his second film, never settles on a consistent tone. He relies on voice-over narration lifted whole cloth from Hansen’s book—a concession, in a way, to the fact that he never solves the problem of how to make his characters’ interior struggles visually dramatic. The narrator informs us what the characters are thinking as we watch them stare pensively out a window or across a windswept plain.

If anything, the movie aims to complicate its own apparently straightforward title. The “Coward Robert Ford,” like Mark David Chapman (John Lennon’s assassin) killed his object of worship. Though biblical parallels to Judas might spring to mind (James is even buried on Good Friday), Jesse James is no JC. Bob Ford’s fixation is more reminiscent of Tom Ripley’s homoerotic obsession with wealthy dilettante Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley; both characters seem unfinished, socially inept, and incomplete without someone to look up to. Jesse James tells Ford, “I don’t know if you want to be like me, or if you want to be me.”

Pitt is an interesting choice for the part of Jesse James. Casting a world-famous celebrity—who so many people want to be like or to just be—as the kind of outlaw who inspired Robert Ford’s dangerously unstable brand of hero-worship, is a clever bit of meta-commentary. But the idea is more effective in the abstract than in the execution. Pitt lacks the intensity that makes you believe Jesse James murdered seventeen people. The movie as a whole would have benefited from the fierceness and unpredictability of an actor like Daniel Craig, whose piercing blue eyes can seem challenging, ruthless, and devoid of pity, including self-pity.

Pitt does creditable work, and I can’t fault him for tackling challenging, un-Hollywood material. He plays James as careworn, weary; perhaps tired of living up to his own outsized reputation. Either that or he’s coasting. It’s difficult to tell. The characters that satellite James are supposed to be terrified of him, living in constant fear of his wrath or his suspicion or his vengeance. Pitt does not seem dangerous. He carries himself with the same stoner lassitude that has characterized his performances of late. It is by no means a bad performance, just a predictable one, where another actor might have tapped a deeper vein of anger, cruelty, and pathos.

The movie merited its two Oscar nominations: Roger Deakins for his atmospheric cinematography and Casey Affleck for his portrayal of Bob Ford, the sycophant from hell. Affleck, unlike Pitt, is able to manifest his character’s pained, insecure interior life through a performance eloquent with nervous mannerisms, unconvincing affectations, empty smiles, and crippling social awkwardness. Ford’s story is a sad one, worth telling, and no doubt when Hansen came across it in the history books he felt that he couldn’t improve on the truth. Perhaps Dominik felt like he couldn’t improve on his source material—you can just about read the book in the same amount of time it takes to watch the movie.

USCCB Rating: A-III — Adults

Drama, Westerns | 1 Comment »

Directed by John Ford

Starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, and Vera Miles

John Ford’s The Searchers exists at the strange intersection between the Western’s early period of mythmaking (Stagecoach, Shane, A Fistful of Dollars) and the later revising of that same myth (Once Upon a Time in the West, Unforgiven). The push-pull tension between Ford’s desire to make a straightforward western and his desire to subvert the stereotypes of the genre makes for a fascinating film, if not an entirely successful one.

In The Searchers Ford begins to examine more closely, with shrewder discernment, the myth of the Western Hero—here, as in other Ford films, personified by the Duke himself, John Wayne. Wayne stars as Ethan Edwards, a gritty ex-Confederate tracking a hostile tribe of Comanche Indians who have killed his relatives and kidnapped his niece.

The Duke does good work in his most complicated role. Edwards is not just the brusque and swaggering Wayne of pop-culture myth—though he’s that, too—he’s also a man consumed by hatred and fierce vindictiveness. His obsessive pursuit of “Scar,” the tribe’s bloodthirsty chieftain, has echoes of Captain Ahab’s relentless chase after the White Whale in Moby Dick. When the posse of ‘searchers’ comes across the burial of a Comanche tribe member, Ethan pulls out his gun and shoots out the corpse’s eyes.

The Reverend asks, “What good did that do ya?”

Ethan answers, matter-of-fact—“By what you preach… none. But, what that Comanche believes - ain’t got no eyes… can’t enter the spirit land. Has to wander forever between the winds.”

In other words, Ethan’s hatred runs so deep he’s willing to pursue a Comanche into the afterlife and there deny him the chance for eternal peace. It’s a disturbing scene—more disturbing the more you think about it.

The Searchers becomes an extended chase across the inhospitable wilderness of the American frontier with Ethan and his younger companion, Martin (Jeffrey Hunter—who would later play Christ in King of Kings) doggedly tracking the Comanche tribe over the course of a five-year period. Edwards explains, “Injun will chase a thing till he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. Same way when he runs. Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that’ll just keep comin’ on. So we’ll find ‘em in the end, I promise you. We’ll find ‘em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.”

It’s a story as simple as the turnin’ of the earth and Westerns work best when they operate at the level of parable, if not exactly myth. High Noon, for example, was an almost biblical examination of human conscience, while the more recent 3:10 to Yuma explored the nature of redemption and “doing the right thing” no matter what the cost. The Searchers has intriguing clues to its meaning—such as the way Ford frames his characters in doorways and through the mouths of caves and behind tree branches as if they are never free, always confined. Or how Edwards’ nemesis is named “Scar”—a name that suggests Edwards’ own interior wounds. There are also beautiful shots that passages of haunting power glimpses of what Joseph Conrad would call man’s “impenetrable darkness.” The raid on the homestead early in the film is visceral in a horror-movie kind of way, and there is a shockingly brutal scene when Edwards returns from discovering a body in a canyon. Wayne does especially moving, effective work here.

Hailed as a classic of the Western genre, The Searchers is more interesting to think about than it is to watch. Like many westerns of its vintage, it hasn’t aged well: an overbearing Max Steiner score, some dialogue as wooden as a log cabin, the usual cultural stereotypes, and a contrived ending are all trademarks of the time. The ending is especially disappointing. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that two characters undergo miraculous changes-of-heart at literally the last minute in order to supply an audience-pleasing ending. I’m afraid the operation of God’s grace is not enough to convince me that such transformations are possible—from a storytelling standpoint, there simply wasn’t enough set-up. In my mind, the off-key ending irreparably mars what might have been a flawed but enduring masterpiece.

It’s only fair to acknowledge, however, that mine is a minority opinion. John Ford (a.k.a. “Sean Aloysius O’Fearna”) is rightly considered one of the best directors in cinema history and The Searchers is widely regarded as one of his best films, if not his very best. His influence has been incalculable, and he could count among his many slavish devotees Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg. The Searchers features the awe-inspiring vistas of Monument Valley (Ford’s favorite location), a multifaceted performance by John Wayne, and a storyline that operates on parallel tracks as a traditional western and as a parable about human nature. Judge for yourself whether it deserved to make the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 American films of last century.

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directed by George Cosmatos

Rated: R (violence, a silly love-conquers-all adulterous sub-plot–not for young children)

reviewed by Debra Murphy 

As some of you know, my middle child, Luke, is "high-functioning" autistic. One of the interesting things about this condition is that Luke gets little "obsessions"–fierce interests in certain, often obscure, subjects that can last for months, even years. Around the time of Luke’s eighteenth birthday his obsessioon (or at least one of them) was 1990s Westerns–a subgenre which has never held much attraction for me, let me hasten to add.

Nonetheless, as is the Murphy custom, the birthday child got to choose the family movie that night, and in honor of Luke’s eighteenth we all sat down obediently to view, initially without much enthusiasm, Luke’s pick: the 1993 Western Tombstone starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday.

(more…)

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