Hardly an Assassination

After hearing many good things about the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I settled down to watch it with Katy, Alice, and Michael Michael on Sunday night. Most people tend to herald the film as a visual masterpiece with terrific cinematography and art direction, including my compatriots. While I can revel in visual candy for short periods of time like with certain music videos, I am not inclined to care for an entire movie. I suspect this mentality occurs for three reasons:
1) I grew up watching fuzzy television sets and never put much value in how the screen looks.
2) My vision is hardly 20/20, so, again, I don't prioritize how things look.
3) Since I get bored and prefer multitasking during movies, I don't devote the attention necessary to enjoy a film .

So while my friends oohed and ahhed at how beautiful it was, I was typing, only glancing up periodically. Admittedly, this action certainly sabotaged my full enjoyment of the movie, but that didn't change the fact that I found it thoroughly boring. You'd think a film about Jesse James would have a little bit more action. On top of that, the acting was just awkward, perhaps intentionally so, but jarringly all the same. I'm not too keen on Casey Affleck's acting; his career is clearly the result of nepotism, not unlike most of Hollywood, I suppose. My take is that he was told to play the character of Ford as sad, unconfident, and pathetic and that he missed the boat by taking that to mean to act robotic even though the movie's motif necessitates his character be somewhat relatable.

Also, I was distracted by the fact that Affleck's character seemed gay. Not distracted in the sense that I was upset and consequently disinterested, but in that I was then searching the internet to see if this was a fact or something I was reading into the performance. Apparently, I'm not the only person to see that, but it's not a popular opinion that Ford's fascination with James borders on sexual infatuation. Maybe I'm just hyperaware of queer subtext due to my years in Pitzer College's Media Studies department (for example: I'll stake my life on the fact that Superbad is about a repressed homosexual relationship),

Halfway through, all of my friends had stopped watching for various reasons even though they were far more into the film than me. Part of me was ready to quit, I was this close to skipping to the end so I could see the big assassination scene, but Amy came by and encouraged me to finish it. I sure wasn't going to pay to rent it again only to start from the beginning. Some parts were better than others: toward the end, the acting became laughable at points, like this one...



There's something about the delivery of the line "such extravagance" that's both horrible and comical. Furthermore, the script gets a bit sloppy with the infrequent narration. If a film relies on voice-overs, it should be a bit more consistent and not just to share information that they couldn't figure out how to work in otherwise. Then again, I suppose I appreciated any excuse to cut out additional scenes from an already two and a half hour movie. Just after I expressed to Amy what a waste of time the movie had been, a funny thing happened: I started to enjoy it.

Sure, it wasn't enjoyable until the last twenty minutes of the film, but damn those were a great twenty minutes. It only took the death of Jesse James to be complete for the film to get good. (Sorry, maybe I should have spoiler alerted that, but I figure given the title, the outcome is even less suspenseful than Titanic.) While the first two plus hours were a slow-moving western, the last twenty minutes introduced the thesis that coincidentally corresponds with my undergraduate thesis about notions of fame.

Part of what had bothered me about the film was the glamorization of Jesse James. James was an awful person who killed people, even children, for eir own gain. While earlier in his life, James had a radical political agenda so I could more easily overlook his violent tactics, in his later years it was purposeless slaying. I had contempt for glossing over the man's plain evilness and instead giving him a hero edit, but as it turned out, this approach was part of the film's point.

After James's death, he was glorified by the masses: his body was toured around the country to the delight of many. He would be immortalized, while his killer, Ford, would be reviled. In killing James, Ford anticipated becoming a hero for stopping an outlaw, yet found himself despised for destroying a legend. He wrote and performed in a stage play which reenacted James's death, and while people came for the notoriety, they still loathed him, branding him a coward. Ford never gained the acclaim he expected, ultimately being ambushed and killed in no worse a manner than he killed James, an act of which the public approved. Ford had become a truly pathetic figure, turning the story into one of the more gut-wrenchingly tragic tales I've ever seen.

The exploration of society's warped sense of celebrity is poignant and still applicable. I just wish this theme had been given more attention in the film's first two hours.