"Assassination of Jesse James" a celluloid crime

By Kirk Honeycutt

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - At the heart of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" lies an obsessive, destructive relationship between two disparate yet oddly similar men. One eventually will kill the other.

Yet this fascinating relationship gets smothered in pointlessly long takes, repetitive scenes, grim Western landscapes and mumbled, heavily accented dialogue. 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.

Coming from the production companies of the film's star, Brad Pitt, and Ridley and Tony Scott and based on Hansen's well-received novel, the film's pedigree probably means a solid opening week. However, word-of-mouth might kill the movie faster than Robert Ford killed Jesse James.

For the record, Robert (Casey Affleck) doesn't shoot Pitt's Jesse until 132 minutes into the 160-minute running time. Strangely, what happens afterward is at least as interesting as what leads up to the murder. So the film also suffers from an imbalance: Too much time is lavished on the inevitable and not enough on its aftermath.

In 1881, Jesse James, 34, is at the height of his infamy as an outlaw. Bob Ford, 19, is the restless, country rube and younger brother of a James gang member. He has read every nickel novel written about the gangsters and is drawn to the scary, charismatic Jesse, who heads the gang along with his older brother, Frank (Sam Shepard, who's barely in the film despite being third-billed).

Most gang members are wary if not frightened of the moody Jesse and his explosive, often murderous temper, but Robert is irresistibly drawn to him. It's never clear to either man whether Robert wants to be like Jesse, destroy Jesse or somehow become him. The film is nothing if not a meditation on a fan's obsession with a celebrity, a phenomenon now called stalking.

But Dominik, who also wrote the script, drags out this poisonous courtship with protracted scenes either virtually empty of significance or redundant. Clouds roll swiftly over western skies. The weeds flap in the breeze. Men grunt, spit and stare at one another in mockery or fear.

Then there are those accents. Whether they accurately reflect the country rube-cracker speech of 19th century Missouri, they frequently land on 21st century ears as unintelligible sounds. Couldn't this have been cleaned up on the ADR stage?