The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The assassination of Jesse James is a movie I think highly of, but of which I regard stylistic aspects far more interesting than "story" or "content". That's not even a problem, I think. Great movie, great music, great cinematography! Elegiac, in a good way. I thought it would have been situated in the Western genre to a much greater extent than it was, but then again, perhaps my ideas about "westerns" boil down to preconceptions, rather than a variety of experiences? A reviewer in The New York Times complains that the film is weighed down by the art-centred pictures, and that the director hereby looses focus of his subject matter. I would beg to disagree. The film is about Jesse James, middle aged, his "best"&worst years behind him. He has become an icon, a star, a story. Bob Ford is a kind of stalker with a youthful loving adoration for a legend. What could have been pompous, is here, I think, simply a good treatment of this story. The emptiness of fame, "the art of killing". Realism sips through, at times, and these moments resonate all the more forcefully against this background of an idea-world. Rather than taking the idea of the Great American Gangster seriously by making it into something larger-than-life (which, as the reviewer points out, has been done a thousand times before), the focus of interest in Dominik's film seems to be a world shared by people lost in the images they have created of themselves. The cinematography reflect the self-indulgence of the characters.