Kiwi director Andrew Dominik (who made the excellent Chopper) tells the story of Robert Ford (Casey The Better Affleck), a fella who'd grown up idolising America's "first celebrity" - gun slinger Jesse James (Brad Pitt). The ambitious and idealistic Ford never imagined history would remember him as the "dirty coward" who shot James in the back.
At only 19, Ford joins the infamous gang of outlaws. But as Jesse James' notoriety grows, so does the authority’s resolve to kill him. With a price on his head, James wages war on these enemies, unknowing that the greatest threat to his life may well come from those he trusts most. How did James & Ford become friends? And what happened between them in the days & hours leading up to the gunshot that would end one’s life and become the definition of another’s?
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. It's a magnificent throwback to a time when filmmakers found all sorts of ways to refashion Hollywood's oldest and most durable genre...
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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...
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This quiet wow of a Western sneaks up as one hell of a satisfying surprise. Artfully exciting and compulsively watchable even at a butt-numbing 152 minutes, the film makes good on the promise New Zealand writer-director Andrew Dominik showed with Chopper in 2000.
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It's not exactly quick on the draw. But that doesn't stop this psychological saga being a western of the highest calibre, or making Affleck an Oscar longshot.
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Directed by kiwi-born Australian Andrew Dominik, in his first feature since Chopper, this film is not for the cinematically faint of heart - clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes you need to be in this for the long haul. I found myself inexorably drawn in by the pace, by the cinematography, and by the story itself...
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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.
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Set amid gorgeously shot bleak landscapes, this character-driven story is not your typical western, despite focusing on the most famous gunslinger of them all. As a psychological drama it's less of a whodunnit and more of a finger-pointing hedunnit.
Despite being as slow as a cowboy's drawl, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is utterly absorbing viewing and total Oscar bait...
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