I just got back from watching the two-hour, forty-minute The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a western that's quite a bit different than anything I've seen in recent memory. In a year of constant, pleasant surprises, Jesse James is just the latest in a number of surprises, though it certainly isn't for everyone.It isn't an action movie, though it does have a fair amount of killings. It is dialogue driven and relies on its acting and screenplay to carry the audience through to the tragic ending (tragic in more ways than one). It can easily be described as a character study, a slow and methodically meandering character study. Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck both turn in career-best performances, and the movie itself is all but mesmerizing from beginning to end. It suffers from a few loose parts in the middle, but makes up for it with one of the most emotionally devastating endings I've witnessed on screen in a long time.
Read my full The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford movie review here.
