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By Cole Smithey

‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’

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New Zealand director Andrew Dominik (“Chopper”) tells the story of Jesse James’s last days in a patient and unequivocal style that makes us want to turn back history. Based on the 1983 novel by Ron Hansen, Dominik presents an epic western stripped down to its barest elements. The 34-year-old Jesse James (brilliantly played by Brad Pitt) attempts to settle down with his wife (Mary-Louise Parker) and children under the alias of Thomas Howard, but is unable to escape his renown as America’s most popular train robber.

Jesse’s least intelligent follower is Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), the younger brother of trusted James Gang member Charley (Sam Rockwell). Affleck gives an outstanding performance that proves him to be a character actor of immense creativity, clarity and composure. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (“In the Valley of Elah”) utilizes a “big sky” image system as formally composed chapter breaks to seamlessly magnify the story’s epic qualities. Intermittent voice-over narration is the single element that keeps perfection at bay in this highly original addition to the western genre.

There’s an early scene between Jesse’s stoic older brother Frank (majestically played by Sam Shepard) and the 19-year-old wormy Ford that expresses Ford’s infuriating ability to ingratiate himself with the robbers he idolizes. Frank keeps lookout in the thick woods near the James Gang camp. Ford hunches low on the ground in the thick woods and pleads his case for tagging along as Frank’s “sidekick” on the upcoming night’s robbery. Frank impatiently dismisses Ford back to the camp where Ford’s older brother Charley (Rockwell) does some verbal jousting with Dick (Paul Schneider) and Jesse’s cousin Wood (Jeremy Renner) about “poetry not working on whores.” “You can hide things in vocabulary,” Dick tells the others. It’s a humorously loaded message that sends clues about interpreting the film’s measured use of language that gains significance as a yardstick of multiple historic and cultural meanings.

After pistol-whipping a bank guard, during the film’s only train robbery, James explains to his shocked cohorts, “They got their company rules, and I got my mean streak, and that’s how we get things done around here.” It’s a satisfying character and theme line that shows how James explains his actions, and how he views his compartmentalized attack on social injustice enacted by thieves with pens, who would eventually disguise their crimes under the name of “corporation.” The suspenseful heist is a noir-inflected nighttime mission that plants the seed of James effectiveness as a highly skilled criminal mastermind. His innate ability to judge character and situation makes Ford a surprising Achilles’ heel, and it’s the inescapable duality between the men that energizes the story.

James gets wind of a plot against him by his former gang, and traces their steps back to Wood and Dick, who have let violent jealousy, over a woman, drive a stake between them. The inciting event allows for a remarkably erotic outhouse scene between Dick and a not-so-distant relative of Wood, Sarah Hite (Kailin See), when she invites Dick with the telling line, “and you thought I was a lady.”

Dominik keeps the script’s subtext of “celebrity culture” at a distance until the film’s coda resolves Ford’s life after killing the gunslinger legend that he worshiped from dime novels. Here is a modern western “art film” that utilizes the camera’s discreet observations to sculpt a tidal wave of generational zeitgeist from a clash of ideals. It is a movie to be savored. CV

‘The Kingdom’

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There’s a lot of bang for the buck in director Peter Berg’s juiced-up “what-if” illustration of a U.S. Special Forces rogue team responding to a massive attack on oil company employees and their kin inside the imaginary safety of a housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Top heavy on the power of personal vendetta to resolve anti-capitalist violence overseas, “The Kingdom” trades on the same lowest-common-dominator anger that turned “Rambo” into a winning franchise. Immediately after a series of carefully timed blasts kill more than 200 people, including first-responders, FBI investigators Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx), Grant (Chris Cooper), Janet (Jennifer Garner) and Adam (Jason Bateman) go off the reservation with a secret five-day mission to carry out a surgical take-no-prisoners investigation in Riyadh. 

Put in the hands of a standoffish and ineffectual Saudi military, Fleury gradually makes friends with Colonel Al Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom) who unknowingly helps obtain a Royal endorsement for Fleury’s crew to go after the cell responsible for the carnage. Fleury’s and Ghaz’s not-so-meet-cute friendship mocks the script’s stream of insults lobbed at the incompetence of Saudi military and at America’s stonewalling bureaucracy. Know-it-all explosives expert Grant commands Saudi officers to drain water from the explosion’s initial crater, and learns that an ambulance was used to disguise the assault. The implication here is that Saudi investigators are far inferior to the Americans who must teach them how to conduct a proper investigation. The infuriating irony is that no such investigation was ever put in place at Ground Zero before or after President Bush initiated a war with Afghanistan 18 hours after the planes hit the towers.

“The Kingdom” is a testosterone-amped big budget brother to Richard Shepard’s “The Hunting Party,” a movie that suggests that a close-knit crew is enough to bring down any criminal, even an Osama bin Laden. It’s the same school of opinion that says trained squadrons of U.S. Air Force jets could and should have performed aerial escorting maneuvers to prevent the 9/11 hijacked planes from hitting the World Trade buildings. This arena of informed thinking is an affront to the corporatized military complex, busy funding a trademarked “War on Terror” that has already bilked trillions of dollars in worthless contracts from American taxpayers. The fact that Hollywood institution Michael Mann (“The Insider”) produced “The Kingdom,” speaks volumes about the level of outside-the-box political thinking going on in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan is no lead-by-example Zen thinker. Arabs are portrayed as lesser people. Their military is disorganized and brutal, their Prince leader is shown as an easily influenced spoiled brat and Arab civilians equate somewhere beneath American projects-housed citizens. The plot comes to rest on Fleury’s team locating an Arab with missing fingers, because “every bomb maker gets bitten by his own work.” Director Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights”) orchestrates an action-packed chase sequence wherein resident FBI black-humorist investigator Adam gets kidnapped before being taken to a secluded apartment to be decapitated for posterity on videotape. Although Adam’s imminent death ramps up the suspense, the contrived situation bears no resemblance to actual methodologies of Arab kidnappers who keep their victims alive in order to attract media attention before ever killing them.

A bullets-blazing climax plays as a hollow trump card before Carnahan’s tacked-on fatalist political statement that gets whispered to the audience in big bold letters. Zealotry is all around, and it’s a product that certain CEOs know how to package with impunity. How long do we have to stare into the abyss? From the message of “The Kingdom,” we’ll hit rock bottom before we get the answer. CV

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