andrew dominik Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With the writer's strike in full swing, I thought I'd pay tribute to a few of the writers who currently have films in theaters. Quite frankly, you really have to admire some of them. Take Allison Burnett, who adapted Feast of Love (2 screens) as well as this year's earlier Resurrecting the Champ. Burnett received very little love for either movie, but consider how hard it must have been to cut down a novel and expand a newspaper article at the same time? It makes my head spin. It's also quite impressive that Burnett was able to work again after his earlier script was turned into the universally panned film Autumn in New York (2000). But the thing that impressed me most of all about Burnett is his first produced script, Bloodfist III: Forced to Fight (1992), a vehicle for "Z" level action star Don 'The Dragon' Wilson. This is from a guy who studied playwriting and has published a novel. I can only imagine what it must be like to sit down and actually write something like that. Do you tape the paycheck on the wall next to your desk and keep staring at it? Good for Burnett that he made it out of that hole.

Then there's The Simpsons Movie (96 screens), which has at least eleven credited writers, and possibly more who added material without credit. Among them we have David Mirkin, who directed one of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures, Heartbreakers (2001), and James L. Brooks, who won an armload of Oscars for Terms of Endearment (1983). Most of the others are from TV, and I'd like to think they wrote this movie the way they might have written a half-hour episode: by sitting around a big table and throwing out ideas and laughing a lot. Those writer rooms are usually decorated with stuffed animals and novelty items, as well as plates of donuts and other snacks -- perhaps some kind of air freshener as well. It makes me all warm just thinking about it.

The third film by Julie Taymor, Across the Universe (339 screens), has racked up an intriguing mixture of reviews. Some have ecstatically called the film a rousing success, and Anne Thompson, writing in Variety, has compared Taymor to Orson Welles! Other reviews have called the film an unmitigated disaster of proportions similar to the infamous flop Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), which also re-imagines several Beatles numbers and incorporates them into an ill-advised movie musical. Myself, I rated the film somewhere in the middle. I thought it had a handful of truly inspired moments, a few truly awful moments (apologies to Eddie Izzard), and a great number of numbingly routine ones. (It reminded me too much of a play, not a movie.)

Writing in the New York Times a few years back, A.O. Scott mourned the absence of total disasters in the movies. A lack of disasters meant that people weren't really putting themselves on the line, and by turns, that safeguard also results in a lack of real masterworks. Pauline Kael once wrote a review of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 entitled "Hail, Folly." She praised "huge, visionary epics" of "mad" directors, like D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Erich von Stroheim's Greed, Abel Gance's Napoleon, Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible trilogy (left unfinished after Part II), and Francis Ford Coppola's then as-yet-unfinished Apocalypse Now. "The calamity of movie history is not the follies that get made, but the follies that don't get made," she said.

I was hoping for a chance to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford a second time before I wrote my review, but only to confirm my suspicions that it's a surprising near-masterpiece, certainly one of the year's best films, and the best Western to come across the range since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1996). I had been looking forward to the film, mainly because 2007 had previously yielded two very good Westerns in Seraphim Falls and 3:10 to Yuma (we'll say nothing more about the wretched September Dawn). I had also admired New Zealand director Andrew Dominik's previous and only other feature, Chopper (2000). But none of this prepared me for the scope, artistry and brilliance of this new film.

The drawback is that the 160-minute The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is going to be one of those "difficult" movies that doesn't get the recognition it deserves, mainly because it can't be quickly explained or understood, or broken down into a 30-second sound byte. It's not a sweeping, spectacular epic, but rather a quiet, wintry epilogue. It will be critiqued with single words: "long," "boring," "confusing." Nevertheless, it's in good company with Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Jane Campion's In the Cut, Gus Van Sant's Gerry, George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, Terrence Malick's The New World, Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia, Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, David Lynch's Inland Empire and William Friedkin's Bug -- all movies that will eventually have their day in the sun despite their current sad critical standing. The real hitch is that Jesse James chooses not to deconstruct the James myth, as would be the expected, rational approach in our post-modern age, but rather embraces it and expands on it.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford starts with images, moments, visions -- all grounded in the dry, calm tone of the narrator explaining where we are, and who we're watching. We meet Jesse James -- played by Brad Pitt -- and Robert Ford -- played by Casey Affleck; their ultimate relationship can hardly be in doubt, given the title of the Ron Hansen novel Andrew Dominik's adapted for the screen. But this isn't a mystery. Instead, Dominik gives us -- through gorgeous camerawork and a ridiculously talented group of actors -- a carefully-crafted dreamlike vision that captures the moment in time when The West became America, when a frontier became part of civilization, when the myth of the West went from something lived to a story that was told.

With amazing cinematography (courtesy of regular Coen Brothers collaborator Rodger Deakins) and a sprawling cast (Pitt and Affleck aside, other parts are played by Sam Shepard, Sam Rockwell, Paul Schneider, Ted Levine and Jeremy Renner), you can feel what Dominik's shooting for. He's made a rich, ripe,'70s-styled Western that exploits and explodes the Western mythos, equally influenced by Altman's range and reach in depicting the affairs of men and Malick's wide-eyed wonder in depicting the natural world. (There are a few Coen Brothers touches in with the Malick and Altman, as well; a tea spoon shows bitter knowledge sinking in, death comes as clumsy fumbling lunges.) With its wintry tones and measured movements, you'd be excused for thinking that The Assassination of Jesse James is far from Dominik's first feature, the low-budget, brawling and messy prison story Chopper. At the same time, though, both are about criminal aristocrats -- the best possible kind of bad men. You want to see them change their lives, but know full well they can't.

Thanks to people like Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood and Lawrence Kasdan, I'm a huge fan of the Western genre. (Yes, Lawrence Kasdan. What of it? Silverado rocks!) So when I read that Warner Bros. was bankrolling a Western with Brad Pitt as Jesse James and Casey Affleck as the man who (finally) put Jesse in a pine box, I was more than a little intrigued. Then I learned that Andrew Dominik (Chopper) would be directing, that Ridley Scott (one of my favorites) was producing, and that the supporting cast would include Sam Rockwell, Zooey Deschanel and Ted Levine. I was officially psyched for this movie.

Unfortunately that was about two years ago. So where the heck is the movie already? Its release date has been pushed around more violently than a Big Mac at a vegan rally, but what gives? It's got BRAD PITT in it, right? How tough is it to release a Brad Pitt movie these days? Well, according to The L.A. Times, the flick's been met with some pretty unfriendly test screening audiences. Reports also indicate that director Dominik has his preferred cut, but Pitt and Scott also have a version that they like. One of the cuts apparently runs over three hours long; WB wants something more Clint Eastwood-y, whereas Mr. Dominik seems to be shooting for something a bit more Terrence Malick-ish. Good thing they have three-time Oscar winner Michael Kahn helping out in the editing room.

Seems to be a prickly issue all around, but the thing only cost about $30 million, which is probably about as low-budget a studio Western as you'll ever find these days. Based on the book by Ron Hansen, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is presently scheduled for release on September 21. And I bet they shorten the title too.