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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford wants desperately to be a classic, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. But by attempting to make a film beyond his creative abilities, director Andrew Dominik ends up with a two-hour- and-40-minute movie “as unwieldy as its elongated title.” The movie’s central psychological study, Robert Ford, is no fun to watch. Casey Affleck turns in a fine performance as the insane James fan, whose obsession with the criminal turned murderous. But his character is so creepy that watching him worm his way into Jesse James’ life for two hours is “close to torture.” The film offers an intriguing reading of James through the lens of contemporary celebrity, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly. The casting of Brad Pitt as James drives home the idea of “lethal paranoia as the natural state brought on by the weight of too much legend building and the warp of too much unrequited fandom.” If only the filmmakers hadn’t felt the need to narrate this movie to death, said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. “On the off-chance we’re suffering from temporary blindness,” Dominik has a voice-over narrating the characters’ every move. By the time the narrator tells us that Jesse’s wife is wiping her hands on her apron while Mary-Louise Parker does just that, audiences might be giggling.
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