The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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DVD details

Actor: Alison Elliott, Mary-Louise Parker, Michael Copeman, Ted Levine, Tom Aldredge
Brand: Warner Brothers
Composer: Nick Cave
Cinematographer: Roger Deakins
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 160 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-02-05
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video

DVD Reviews of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

DVD Review: Beautiful, Slow, But Beautiful
Summary: 4 Stars

Think "There Will Be Blood" meets the wild west. This is a slow, pensive and brilliantly creative piece of cinematography. Its about good character development, gorgeous camera shots, lots of mood, etc - not big action and fast scenes. Its much more cerebral. You probably need to be expecting this to enjoy it.

DVD Review: And I even hate Westerns
Summary: 5 Stars

Let me begin this review by saying that in general, I hate Western movies. If you ask me to name my 100 favorite movies, Silverado and Dances with Wolves might come in somewhere around 95. I thought Eastwood's Unforgiven (released in 1992) was a dark, and crappy rehash of Pretty Woman (released in 1990), and I laughed out loud whenever listening to the contrived dialogues of Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns.

So watching this movie was a pleasant surprise. Brad Pitt has a hobby of picking doomed characters to play; but he always does an incredible job, as exemplified in this movie. Pitt plays Jesse James, the passive-aggressive anti-hero who wants to trust those around him, but whose actions only create distrust. Casey Affleck plays Robert Ford, the youngest of a large brood who never amounts to much in his life until he joins the James gang. About half the screentime revolves around their relationship, with the rest of the time playing out the tragedy that is the life of crime, vengeance and violence.

For a Western movie, there is very little violence, maybe about 10 minutes in all out of over 2.5 hours of running time. The rest is in dialogue, showing the audience what goes thru the minds of men who cannot really trust each other with their most important possesions - their lives. So in a way, this is not really a Western movie, it is more of a crime drama; an 19th century American midwest version of the Godfather. All in all, a great movie and probably one of the 10 best movies of 2007.

DVD Review: WHAT!! Best movie of 2007. Give me a break!!!
Summary: 1 Stars

I read a great portion of the reviews and was swayed to purchase. It must have been written by people who worked on the film to generate some extra cash, since it did so poorly at the box office.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to like this movie. Especially on Blu-Ray. Because most of the reviews said Cinematography was Soooo Incredible. But, half way through....
I stopped the movie, because I could see the frustration on my my wife's and our guests faces. Well we did finish this herring to the end. I had to apologize for showing SUCH A STINKER of a MOVIE!!!

It was really BOARING!!!

I said it!

Yes, the King has no clothes!

I did purchase another western at the same time. "The Professionals" it was a great movie and we all commented how great Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin and Jack Palance were. Real westerns have good shootouts and good story lines. This Jesse James movie about the end of his career and it mainly focused on Robert Ford (who killed him). BOARING!!! This movie could have been made for TV and cut down to an hour.

After I write this, I am going to literally stick this Blu-Ray movie in my shredder and toss the case. It is not good enough to even give it away to a friend. It is that bad. If you don't believe me, rent it!!! Then you will have not wasted your money, like I did.

DVD Review: Well-made western drama
Summary: 4 Stars

I enjoyed this film. Although the pace is slow, you become aware that the film is beautifully crafted and well-acted. Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt are excellent in the roles of Jesse James and Robert Ford. And who would've thought James Carville would take a stab at acting? I think this film is well worth your time if you like westerns.

DVD Review: Almost as Long as the Title...
Summary: 3 Stars

Adapted from 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. (And this from a guy whose favorite directors include Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, and David Lean.) Here's the problem, I think. Though meditatively paced, it is 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? To get its jumbled ideas across, the movie relies on voice-over narration lifted whole cloth from Hansen's book -- a concession, in a way, to the fact that the film never solves the problem of how to make its characters' interior struggles visually dramatic. Instead, the narrator informs us what the characters are thinking as we watch them stare pensively out a window or across a windswept plain.

Pitt is an interesting choice for the part of Jesse James. Casting a world-famous celebrity as the world-famous celebrity outlaw 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 should be commended for tackling interesting, offbeat material, however.

Casey 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 the director, Andrew 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.

Description of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Everyone in 1880s America knows Jesse James. He's the nation's most notorious criminal, hunted by the law in 10 states. He's also the land's greatest hero, lauded as a Robin Hood by the public. Robert Ford? No one knows him. Not yet. But the ambitious 19-year-old aims to change that. He'll befriend Jesse, ride with his gang. And if that doesn't bring Ford fame, he'll find a deadlier way. Friendship becomes rivalry and the quest for fame becomes obsession in this virile epic produced in part by Ridley Scott and featuring gripping portrayals by Brad Pitt (winner of the Venice Film Festival Best Actor Award) as Jesse and Casey Affleck as the youth drawn closer to his goal.and farther from his own humanity.

Of all the movies made about or glancingly involving the 19th-century outlaw Jesse Woodson James, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the most reflective, most ambitious, most intricately fascinating, and indisputably most beautiful. Based on the novel of the same name by Ron Hansen, it picks up James late in his career, a few hours before his final train robbery, then covers the slow catastrophe of the gang's breakup over the next seven months even as the boss himself settles into an approximation of genteel retirement. But in another sense all of the movie is later than that. The very title assumes the audience's familiarity with James as a figure out of history and legend, and our awareness that he was--will be--murdered in his parlor one quiet afternoon by a backshooting crony.

The film--only the second to be made by New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Dominik--reminds us that Dominik's debut film, Chopper (2000), was the cunningly off-kilter portrait of another real-life criminal psychopath who became a kind of rock star to his society. The Jesse James of this telling is no Robin Hood robbing the rich to give to the poor, and that train robbery we witness is punctuated by acts of gratuitous brutality, not gallantry. Nineteen-year-old Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) seeks to join the James gang out of hero worship stoked by the dime novels he secretes under his bed, but his glam hero (Brad Pitt) is a monster who takes private glee in infecting his accomplices with his own paranoia, then murdering them for it. In the careful orchestration of James's final moments, there's even a hint that he takes satisfaction in his own demise.

Affleck and Pitt (who co-produced with Ridley Scott, among others) are mesmerizing in the title roles, but the movie is enriched by an exceptional supporting cast: Sam Shepard as Jesse's older, more stable brother Frank; Sam Rockwell as Bob Ford's own brother Charlie, whose post-assassination descent into madness is astonishing to behold; Paul Schneider, Garret Dillahunt, and Jeremy Renner as three variously doomed gang members; and Mary-Louise Parker, who as Jesse's wife Zee has few lines yet manages with looks and body language to invoke a wellnigh-novelistic backstory for herself. There are also electrifying cameos by James Carville, doing solid actorly work as the governor of Missouri; Ted Levine, as a lawman of antic spirit; and Nick Cave, composer of the film's score (with Warren Ellis) and screenwriter of the Aussie "Western" The Proposition, suddenly towering over a late scene to perform the folk song that set the terms for the book and movie's title.

Still, the real costar is Roger Deakins, probably the finest cinematographer at work today. The landscapes of the movie (mostly in Alberta and Manitoba) will linger in the memory as long as the distinctive faces, and we seem to feel the sting of its snows on our cheeks. Interior scenes are equally persuasive. Few Westerns have conveyed so tangibly the bleakness and austerity of the spaces people of the frontier called home, and sought in vain to warm with human spirit. --Richard T. Jameson

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