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dangermousieSo yes.
Yesterday, Mr. Mousie and I went to watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. You'd think that going to see an almost three hour movie that starts after 10pm is a bad idea but tired as I was, I remained bolt awake throughout, and in fact, was just left sitting stunned after he movie ended. It's not often that I have that weird feeling, once the movie ends, that is an equivalent of almost being startled, waking up to the world you forgot, but Assassination gave me that feeling.
The movie deals with the last year in the life of Jesse James, a notorious 19th century outlaw. Jesse is 34 and his old gang is gone: dead or in prison, and his glory days are behind him as he is increasingly erratic, paranoid, and suicidal. He alternates between his Jesse James existence and his life as Thomas Howard, a respectable businessman with wife and kids (apparently a true fact, though totally mindboggling. His wife knows who he is, but the kids don't). But this movie is also as much, or more, about Robert Ford, the unease-causing, desperately worshipping young gang member wannabe, whose desperation to be Jesse James and desperation to be anybody leads him to the murder of Jesse.
First off, it's a gorgeously filmed movie: leached colors (significantly, we start in the summer, and continue through fall and winter. These characters never see spring again), distortions through reflected surfaces: window panes, picture frames, ice. A fish-lens effect, occasionally, as if looking through an old camera. When I remember the movie, I remember a series of still images: Jesse's daughter's shoe, lying forgotten in the mud, cans of peaches in the store where Bob Ford works, Jesse's still figure on the ice, shooting at his own reflection. It's one of the most beautiful movies I've seen, even if it deals with rather ugly people.
This movie has its own pace and it's a remarkably quiet movie: there are no adrenaline rush gun battles here, not really. This is both a strength and weakness: unless you get into the characters' heads, this is probably boring. But I did and it was beyond grabbing because above all, this is a character study of incredibly fascinating people. None of them are good people, but they are incredibly complicated. I have to give the movie huge points for not making it simple. For not making Jesse a messed up but good outlaw and Bob a snivelling weak groupie. Or alternatively for not making Bob rather good and Jesse someone who deserved to be wiped out.
Jesse is brutal, increasingly unhinged, and yet utterly charismatic, messed-up, and with something more hidden there. He is a bad man who knows he is bad, and is tormented by the fact, but has no desire to stop. I am utterly impressed by Brad Pitt in this role. He never makes Jesse someone to root for, but you can't help but slip up and be sympathetic to him, until he does something else that reminds you he is no misunderstood tragic hero, and yet you can't help but be mesmerized. The movie gets more interesting just when he is there, somehow larger than life even in his ruin.
And Bob? Bob makes me as uneasy as he does those around him, but he is far from a simple groupie gone wrong, or someone out for glory, or anything clear cut. Casey Affleck is amazing in this. His sheer desperation to be somebody comes through so clearly.
For him (and I love how it's clear he is young, he is 20, which plays heavily into this), he is seeking self-validation, desperately. He was seeking it before the murder, but he is even more desperate for it after. That is why he undertakes to re-enact the murder over and over on the stage in New York. He is an actor in the Victorian theater, where everything is clearcut and simple: he is a noble hero, Jesse James a dangerous outlaw better dead. Hip hip hooray.
But he cannot find it, not really. That is why he ends up considering to go see the families of the men Jesse killed: he has no belief in the intrinsic worth of the act, only the fame, the shoring up that what he did was good.
Bob's problem is that he is not a coward, not an idiot, not a weakling. But he is normal. And he wants to be extraordinary. He wants to be Jesse James: the scenes with him watching Jesse are creepy in their intensity. I love that Jesse, nobody's fool, notices that too, and actually asks him whether he wants to be his friend or to be him? (Scene in the bath, yikes). There is nothing sexualized or even hero-worshipping per se about this stalking. It's something rather more desperately disturbing: wanting to be someone else, someone else specific so badly, that you want to know as much as you can in order to be able to 'merge' in your mind. I am especially thinking of the scene the day before he murders Jesse, when he is planning to do it tomorrow. Everyone is out of the house, so he drinks from Jesse's glass, looks through his closet, even lies in Jesse's bed and smells the pillow. He imagines having Jesse's scars and lacking two digits on one finger, the way Jesse is lacking.
But that is the thing, Bob wants to be a legend, he wants to be Jesse, but not even Jesse, who is definitely a talented and extraordinary guy, can cope with being Jesse James. Just see what it did to him. You get the feeling that his violence is now new in not being instrumental. He is not someone who would have a problem shooting without thinking twice, but you get the sense that before, it always was under his control and made sense. But it's all slipping away. I am thinking of the scene with the kid, where he is beating him and threatening him to tell him the whereabouts of the guy he is looking for, but he is also holding his mouth covered. He is utterly irrational and his henchman has to snap him out of it before he does some permanent damage to to kid. But that sort of thing is both the effect and cause of his disintegration. Jesse is not a psychopath and it bothers him, what he has done. Bothers him badly: he ends up sobbing into the side of his horse after the kid incident, and part of it is reaction to his earlier loss of control and part a reaction to all the other earlier things he's done that just add up.
He has done bad things, and even though not expressly, they bother him on the level of his psyche, just as the life hiding from the law, or having his friends and family killed (his original gang is gone, these are third-tier pickings), are bothering him on such a level.
He is a living restless ghost. I am thinking of the scene when he comes in the middle of the night to talk to Charlie, Bob's brother, and tells him how he killed a betraying gang member. (I loved the earlier scene when he met the guy, because you could see the precise moment he decided to kill him: no change in his face, but his eyes shifted into a farewell mode, if it makes any sense). And he is haunted and tormented and yet there is no doubt he is deadly dangerous and would do it again.
In a way, the flaw of Jesse James in Bob's eyes isn't that Jesse is a killer or not a nice guy or what have you. He doesn't care about that. Jesse's flaw, to Bob, is that Jesse James is human: someone who can be very normal (he appears to be a devoted husband and a good father), and someone who is also normal in having issues, and doubts and weaknesses.
He is not the perfect dimebook hero, in either good or bad, the way Bob needs him to be. Because how can he want to be Jesse James, how can he fixate on becoming a legend, how can he view it as salvation when the living proof that there is no salvation in it, is before him?
If you think about it, Jesse is just plain too damaged, and that is something Bob can't forgive and doesn't want to see. He doesn't even need to rob any more, it's just he is too damaged to do anything else. Maybe his intelligence and ability to feel (whatever the feeling is, or maybe 'feeling' is the wrong word. Imagination?) is a huge detriment in life, even if it might help with the robberies. It screws him up. His brother Frank is a lot more typical career criminal. He has no morals so he will do crime, and then when it's dangerous, it doesn't pay any more, he gets out and does something else. And he has no regrets any more than he has scruples. Heck, his reaction to Bob is also a lot more 'normal criminal:' 'You make me uneasy, I don't know what you'll do, so skeedadle.'
But Jesse? Ends up keeping Bob around. It's interesting, because I think it's a mix of things. For one, he finds Bob unpredicatable and so interesting. He is shown throughout the movie to be able to read people incredibly well, so he must be so bored with marionettes around him. He can still read Bob, but it makes it a bit more interesting for him.
But another reason, and I think the main one, is a deathwish. Jesse has a deathwish (I keep thinking about the scene where he asks Charlie if he ever thought about suicide, and saying how when you are wounded and out of your body, you don't want to return to it, and then looking at himself in the ice and shooting the reflection) and having Bob living with him, knowing he is unstable, being able to read him incredibly well, teasing him, giving him a gun as a present, putting your guns down and turning your back on him, utterly vulnerable...it is a complete equivalent of suicide by police. He sees Bob in the reflection of the picture he is cleaning, and there is no surprise on his face.
The thing is, at the last minute, Bob only pulls the trigger because he sees his brother get his gun out. (who is afraid Jesse will kill them instead of taking them to help him rob a bank, as he said. I don't think so because the way Jesse was acting was not shown to be the modus operandi when he rubbed someone out, when he got a person alone: he was planning to ride out with both brothers, and he wasn't going to ride out with two people if he was planning to kill: he by himself couldn't take them both on). And so Bob shoots to shoot first, because otherwise, 'glory' will escape him forever.
And then of course, Jesse's wife running in, to see her husband dead, and wailing, and trying to roust him (and it's the first time she calls him Jesse, she always called him 'Tom' before, to keep up the charade, but now there is no point) and throughout it all, Bob is just sitting, watching it, as if it all would make it more real in his head. Because he doesn't feel any different, he doesn't feel a legend.
And the macabre tag (so reminescent of today, people don't really change) of Jesse's dead body being photogrpahed and photographs sold in drug stores, and Bob re-enacting his betrayal/murder on the New York stage.
And that is the thing, Jesse is a legend in death, and Bob is known only by association. And he ends up killed by a Jesse fan...
And wikipedia entry on Jesse James is fascinating. Seriously, that's a crazy life. If it was in a book, I'd think it was too far-fetched.
Yesterday, Mr. Mousie and I went to watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. You'd think that going to see an almost three hour movie that starts after 10pm is a bad idea but tired as I was, I remained bolt awake throughout, and in fact, was just left sitting stunned after he movie ended. It's not often that I have that weird feeling, once the movie ends, that is an equivalent of almost being startled, waking up to the world you forgot, but Assassination gave me that feeling.
The movie deals with the last year in the life of Jesse James, a notorious 19th century outlaw. Jesse is 34 and his old gang is gone: dead or in prison, and his glory days are behind him as he is increasingly erratic, paranoid, and suicidal. He alternates between his Jesse James existence and his life as Thomas Howard, a respectable businessman with wife and kids (apparently a true fact, though totally mindboggling. His wife knows who he is, but the kids don't). But this movie is also as much, or more, about Robert Ford, the unease-causing, desperately worshipping young gang member wannabe, whose desperation to be Jesse James and desperation to be anybody leads him to the murder of Jesse.
First off, it's a gorgeously filmed movie: leached colors (significantly, we start in the summer, and continue through fall and winter. These characters never see spring again), distortions through reflected surfaces: window panes, picture frames, ice. A fish-lens effect, occasionally, as if looking through an old camera. When I remember the movie, I remember a series of still images: Jesse's daughter's shoe, lying forgotten in the mud, cans of peaches in the store where Bob Ford works, Jesse's still figure on the ice, shooting at his own reflection. It's one of the most beautiful movies I've seen, even if it deals with rather ugly people.
This movie has its own pace and it's a remarkably quiet movie: there are no adrenaline rush gun battles here, not really. This is both a strength and weakness: unless you get into the characters' heads, this is probably boring. But I did and it was beyond grabbing because above all, this is a character study of incredibly fascinating people. None of them are good people, but they are incredibly complicated. I have to give the movie huge points for not making it simple. For not making Jesse a messed up but good outlaw and Bob a snivelling weak groupie. Or alternatively for not making Bob rather good and Jesse someone who deserved to be wiped out.
Jesse is brutal, increasingly unhinged, and yet utterly charismatic, messed-up, and with something more hidden there. He is a bad man who knows he is bad, and is tormented by the fact, but has no desire to stop. I am utterly impressed by Brad Pitt in this role. He never makes Jesse someone to root for, but you can't help but slip up and be sympathetic to him, until he does something else that reminds you he is no misunderstood tragic hero, and yet you can't help but be mesmerized. The movie gets more interesting just when he is there, somehow larger than life even in his ruin.
And Bob? Bob makes me as uneasy as he does those around him, but he is far from a simple groupie gone wrong, or someone out for glory, or anything clear cut. Casey Affleck is amazing in this. His sheer desperation to be somebody comes through so clearly.
For him (and I love how it's clear he is young, he is 20, which plays heavily into this), he is seeking self-validation, desperately. He was seeking it before the murder, but he is even more desperate for it after. That is why he undertakes to re-enact the murder over and over on the stage in New York. He is an actor in the Victorian theater, where everything is clearcut and simple: he is a noble hero, Jesse James a dangerous outlaw better dead. Hip hip hooray.
But he cannot find it, not really. That is why he ends up considering to go see the families of the men Jesse killed: he has no belief in the intrinsic worth of the act, only the fame, the shoring up that what he did was good.
Bob's problem is that he is not a coward, not an idiot, not a weakling. But he is normal. And he wants to be extraordinary. He wants to be Jesse James: the scenes with him watching Jesse are creepy in their intensity. I love that Jesse, nobody's fool, notices that too, and actually asks him whether he wants to be his friend or to be him? (Scene in the bath, yikes). There is nothing sexualized or even hero-worshipping per se about this stalking. It's something rather more desperately disturbing: wanting to be someone else, someone else specific so badly, that you want to know as much as you can in order to be able to 'merge' in your mind. I am especially thinking of the scene the day before he murders Jesse, when he is planning to do it tomorrow. Everyone is out of the house, so he drinks from Jesse's glass, looks through his closet, even lies in Jesse's bed and smells the pillow. He imagines having Jesse's scars and lacking two digits on one finger, the way Jesse is lacking.
But that is the thing, Bob wants to be a legend, he wants to be Jesse, but not even Jesse, who is definitely a talented and extraordinary guy, can cope with being Jesse James. Just see what it did to him. You get the feeling that his violence is now new in not being instrumental. He is not someone who would have a problem shooting without thinking twice, but you get the sense that before, it always was under his control and made sense. But it's all slipping away. I am thinking of the scene with the kid, where he is beating him and threatening him to tell him the whereabouts of the guy he is looking for, but he is also holding his mouth covered. He is utterly irrational and his henchman has to snap him out of it before he does some permanent damage to to kid. But that sort of thing is both the effect and cause of his disintegration. Jesse is not a psychopath and it bothers him, what he has done. Bothers him badly: he ends up sobbing into the side of his horse after the kid incident, and part of it is reaction to his earlier loss of control and part a reaction to all the other earlier things he's done that just add up.
He has done bad things, and even though not expressly, they bother him on the level of his psyche, just as the life hiding from the law, or having his friends and family killed (his original gang is gone, these are third-tier pickings), are bothering him on such a level.
He is a living restless ghost. I am thinking of the scene when he comes in the middle of the night to talk to Charlie, Bob's brother, and tells him how he killed a betraying gang member. (I loved the earlier scene when he met the guy, because you could see the precise moment he decided to kill him: no change in his face, but his eyes shifted into a farewell mode, if it makes any sense). And he is haunted and tormented and yet there is no doubt he is deadly dangerous and would do it again.
In a way, the flaw of Jesse James in Bob's eyes isn't that Jesse is a killer or not a nice guy or what have you. He doesn't care about that. Jesse's flaw, to Bob, is that Jesse James is human: someone who can be very normal (he appears to be a devoted husband and a good father), and someone who is also normal in having issues, and doubts and weaknesses.
He is not the perfect dimebook hero, in either good or bad, the way Bob needs him to be. Because how can he want to be Jesse James, how can he fixate on becoming a legend, how can he view it as salvation when the living proof that there is no salvation in it, is before him?
If you think about it, Jesse is just plain too damaged, and that is something Bob can't forgive and doesn't want to see. He doesn't even need to rob any more, it's just he is too damaged to do anything else. Maybe his intelligence and ability to feel (whatever the feeling is, or maybe 'feeling' is the wrong word. Imagination?) is a huge detriment in life, even if it might help with the robberies. It screws him up. His brother Frank is a lot more typical career criminal. He has no morals so he will do crime, and then when it's dangerous, it doesn't pay any more, he gets out and does something else. And he has no regrets any more than he has scruples. Heck, his reaction to Bob is also a lot more 'normal criminal:' 'You make me uneasy, I don't know what you'll do, so skeedadle.'
But Jesse? Ends up keeping Bob around. It's interesting, because I think it's a mix of things. For one, he finds Bob unpredicatable and so interesting. He is shown throughout the movie to be able to read people incredibly well, so he must be so bored with marionettes around him. He can still read Bob, but it makes it a bit more interesting for him.
But another reason, and I think the main one, is a deathwish. Jesse has a deathwish (I keep thinking about the scene where he asks Charlie if he ever thought about suicide, and saying how when you are wounded and out of your body, you don't want to return to it, and then looking at himself in the ice and shooting the reflection) and having Bob living with him, knowing he is unstable, being able to read him incredibly well, teasing him, giving him a gun as a present, putting your guns down and turning your back on him, utterly vulnerable...it is a complete equivalent of suicide by police. He sees Bob in the reflection of the picture he is cleaning, and there is no surprise on his face.
The thing is, at the last minute, Bob only pulls the trigger because he sees his brother get his gun out. (who is afraid Jesse will kill them instead of taking them to help him rob a bank, as he said. I don't think so because the way Jesse was acting was not shown to be the modus operandi when he rubbed someone out, when he got a person alone: he was planning to ride out with both brothers, and he wasn't going to ride out with two people if he was planning to kill: he by himself couldn't take them both on). And so Bob shoots to shoot first, because otherwise, 'glory' will escape him forever.
And then of course, Jesse's wife running in, to see her husband dead, and wailing, and trying to roust him (and it's the first time she calls him Jesse, she always called him 'Tom' before, to keep up the charade, but now there is no point) and throughout it all, Bob is just sitting, watching it, as if it all would make it more real in his head. Because he doesn't feel any different, he doesn't feel a legend.
And the macabre tag (so reminescent of today, people don't really change) of Jesse's dead body being photogrpahed and photographs sold in drug stores, and Bob re-enacting his betrayal/murder on the New York stage.
And that is the thing, Jesse is a legend in death, and Bob is known only by association. And he ends up killed by a Jesse fan...
And wikipedia entry on Jesse James is fascinating. Seriously, that's a crazy life. If it was in a book, I'd think it was too far-fetched.
