I did not see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford until tonight and now maybe I realize that 2007 was the finest year for film in my lifetime. Director Andrew Dominik’s stark visual treatment and Roger Deakins’ cinematography are even better than advertised, truly astounding, mouth-agape-level at times. The movie was knocked around by the studios and re-edited for more than two years after filiming wrapped. By the time of its release it had become something of a studio stepchild. “Just get it out already!” - that sort of thing. And the performances are what you may expect. Casey Affleck, nominated, shivers and beams and snarls in equal measure. Brad Pitt disappears in Jesse’s callow cool - more impressive perhaps because he’s Brad Pitt than because he’s an actor. It’s a Paul Newman-style performance. Enough Pitt to glow, enough actor to dig in the center. Sam Rockwell and Garrett Dillahunt and the remarkably underutilized Paul Schneider are perfect in their way. And it is a long film, a common complaint, at more than 2 and a half hours. There is little to explain it away - the film looks and feels and moves too good not to be that long.
But it’s Dominik’s script, which I haven’t seen written about much that emptied the chamber for me. Dominik’s decision to use a narrator - so often a storytelling crutch - is elegant. And the dialogue, particularly that of Schneider’s character, the loquacious Dick Liddill, knocked me down. It is intentionally literary, which can also seem wanting and aspirational in most scripts, especially a Western, where vocab is frowned upon. But there’s a stateliness and a tension in it. Here is a taste.
Ed Miller: I was with a girl once. Wasn’t a squaw, but she was purty. She had yellow hair, like uh… oh, like something.Dick Liddil: Like hair bobbed from a ray of sunlight?
Ed Miller: Yeah, yeah. Like that. Boy, you talk good.
Dick Liddil: You can hide things in vocabulary.
Ed Miller: Maybe you and me could writer her a note, send it by post?
Dick Liddil: See, all you gotta do, Ed, is predict her needs and beat her to the punch.
Ed Miller: Well, this girl, she had a real specific job.
Dick Liddil: Specific?
Ed Miller: We’s only together once. She’s afraid of lightning. She came up into the wagon and just cuddled right up to me. She gave me a kind price, too.
Dick Liddil: Well I be! That is specific.
Ed Miller: Yeah, sure, she been with other people. But the kinds of things she said to me, people just don’t say unless they really mean it.
Dick Liddil: “My love said she would marry only me and Jove himself could not make her care, for what women say to lovers, you’ll agree, one writes on running water or air.”
Ed Miller: My God that’s good. Let’s write her that.
Dick Liddil: Naw. Poetry don’t work on whores.