The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

What makes a movie an epic? There is no set definition anywhere that I know of. It’s certainly not length; Gone Girl is 2 1/2 hours long and is most definitely not an epic, but Empire Strikes Back is just around 2 hours and is. It’s not setting, because Star Wars is in space and considered epic, but Star Trek is too and it isn’t. It’s not genre; Gone With The Wind is a historical romance  and is considered an epic, but Sleepless In Seattle is also romantic and isn’t. It’s really a case of “I don’t know it, but I know it when I see it”. It’s unmistakable but undefinable. Which brings us to this movie. It wants to be epic, desperately. It thinks it has quantified the concept of an epic movie into a checklist and ticks off all its boxes. The problem is, it isn’t. Ambition and achievement do not go hand in hand. This movie wants its length and its ponderous pauses and its use of size and time to make it an epic, but it confuses all that with the one thing that all epics share, the one quality that can’t be measured: scope. This movie simply doesn’t have it, and it doesn’t have the story to achieve it. It wastes grotesque amounts of time on long, tedious pauses, staring off into the middle distance, heavy-handed foreshadowing, and melodramatic narration to give us the sense of an epic. But you will feel every minute of this movie, and you will spend many of them screaming “get to the point!”. I’m not expecting a carnage-filled action piece like In A Valley Of Violence, or the youthful rebellion of Young Guns, or the vibrant characters of Tombstone … but all this movie has to offer for its desires to be epic is length and wasting much of the time therein. That ain’t gonna get the job done. Also, this movie has a serious crisis of identity about Jesse James and Robert Ford. Jesse is a mercurial madman, a relentless and remorseless outlaw. For the audience to feel sympathy to him and antipathy, as the title wants is to, it’s the wrong portrayal. Historically accurate, yes, but it hardly makes Ford seem cowardly. And the narration is an annoyance, either papering over plot details, or telling us what we’re watching. I will give it credit for good performances. Casey Affleck’s nervous, sweaty, Robert Ford is a sight. Ford has grafted all his self-worth onto his hero, James, and can’t handle it that the love and worship is not reciprocated. He is twitchy and angsty and it’s refreshing in a western. Sam Rockwell also does a good job as Charlie Ford, who is going along with his brother to support him, but clearly does not like the situations he is being put into. Unfortunately, Brad Pitt’s performance as James is mostly sleepy and uninteresting, and when, towards the end, he gets more personality, it feels like a riff on the random, edgy, psychotic characters Pitt has played so many times before, like in 12 Monkeys. It is a gorgeously shot movie, I’ll say that. Westerns have come a long way. You feel the dirt and grime and blood and the hardness. I appreciate that. But it and Casey Affleck are not nearly enough to save this movie from its lofty and delusional visions of itself, and its wrong-headed way of going about them.