Poetic melancholy or deep regret? What keeps pulling me in? (spoiler warning, if you have never seen this American classic, probably the best Western ever made in my lifetime, you really need to buy this now!) There's such a hopelessness about it, isn't there? How a man can grow up idolising his hero, be fortunate enough to get closer to him than even his own wife and children, then butcher him cruelly down in an act of extreme cowardice, a cold blooded murderer which haunts him for the rest of his miserable life. Life does not get much bleaker than that. Or was the killing of James an act of mercy? Was it a suicide, even though Jesse didn't pull the trigger? Regardless, two men died on that day, one would be remembered in popular folklore and be obsessed over, one wouldn't. I've seen THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD three times, constantly amazed at how gripped I am by it's timeless setting, the meticulous use of historical myth and legend, the magisterial performances and just how coherent the narrative is despite the problems director Andrew Dominik had with the studio over the cutting of the film. He aimed for Malick (the infamous 4 hour cut shown once at the Venice Film Festival which was hailed a "majestic" masterpiece) the studio wanted Leone but he finally delivered a 70's revisionist Western that if it were made in 1973, it would be have the stature of an absolute classic right now. It was an all too familiar case of wrong time, right movie. That's not to say I'm not begging to see what his four hour cut would have looked like, because I really am and hopefully one day we will find out. Why do I feel so much for Bob, why do I get the lump in the back of my throat, everytime I hear the wonderful narrator speak out the words "Edward O'Kelly came up from Bachelor at 1pm on the 8th". Why do my sympathises lie so much with Bob?
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Is it because the narrator is partly wrong at the end when he mentions no biographies would be written about him? If anything this movie is Bob's story, a love letter to him in so many more ways than Ron Hansen's popular original novel and the big hug you feel like Ford needed his own damn life. How fascinated I am by the scenes, the twenty minutes that come once we have buried Jesse James. You rarely see this kind of thing in biopics. It's unlike anything been made today.
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How different, would say MILK have been if, as I thought we should have seen, we witnessed the madness that plagued Dan White (Josh Brolin) once he had finished his all too brief prison sentence? Where the murder of such a likable figure plagued his nights, everytime he tried to escape life with dreams or nightmares of some place else. Is it because it would then become Dan White's film and the Oscar for Best Lead would have gone to him? Would our sympathies switch to Dan White, if he were the lead? The film would sure be a less hopeful one.