This is a good but flawed film that is part plagiarism and part homage to Terrence Malick.
If you love Malick and think of his slow moving epics as masterpieces, then you will love this. If you think Malick's films are self-indulgent exercises in bloated philosophizing, this is not the movie for you. I have one foot in each camp, so the movie strikes me as very strong in parts and very weak in others.
The undeniable strength of the film is its scorching visual beauty. Cinematographer Roger Deakins lost out on the Academy Award to himself for his work on No Country For Old Men, but his effort here was just as deserving. The two standout sequences include the opening 3 1/2 minutes of exposition and the Blue Cut train robbery scene, particularly the approach of the train as it casts fluid ethereal shadows on the masked faces of the bandits. The shot of Jesse James emerging from the steam like a halogen sphinx gave me goose bumps. The rest of the 160 minutes basically features non-stop gorgeous visual compositions; sophomore director Andrew Dominik wisely allows us to linger on the lyrical aestheticism of these shots, which slows the movie down and gives it a ponderous tilt, but it's worth it if you have the attention span for it.
Malick's love of nature imagery and sweeping landscapes bleeds through heavily. Unfortunately, the film mirrors the shortcomings of Days of Heaven and other Malick films; specifically the dialogue, acting and plot are not up to the task of carrying the scenery. The movie draws on Badlands, a genuine Malickian masterpiece, for its themes of celebrity iconography, social deviancy and its rumination on the American West and the outlaw archetype. The problem is the movie is trying a little too hard to plumb the depths of the source material; a movie is not a book and it never will be. If the director doesn't know where one ends and the other begins, the effort is probably going to fall flat on its face.
The Assassination of Jesse James is not helped by the miscasting of many parts. The brilliant and inimitable Sam Shepard (who starred in Days of Heaven, coincidentally) as Frank James is the only one of the bunch that nails it, and he's only in this movie for 5 minutes. Casey Afleck as Bob Ford is appropriately creepy but uneven. You could see the effort and the machinery of the performance; unlike Anthony Perkins who makes you believe he is and always has been Norman Bates, Afleck's Robert Ford seems at times like an actor playing an obsessed loony. Brad Pitt likewise is not up to the task of carrying the role of Jesse James. It's a hard part, asking someone to humanize a myth; I love Pitt in a couple movies, but when a role demands a certain amount of gravitas or depth, he doesn't seem to be the right man for the job. Maybe he's too good looking. Pitt is good, but he's not great, which is what's needed for this part to carry the film. Other minor characters, especially Paul Schneider as Dick Liddil, are pretty much garbage. James Carville makes a nice cameo and I have no complaints about Sam Rockwell's performance.
The best way to describe this was that everything about the narrative and characterization is just a little bit out of joint and off kilter. Not surprisingly, this is the same criticism I have of Malick's films. They want to be transcendent; Malick wants to pull you into his world of dense philosophy and abstractions about the human soul (the guy was going for an advanced degree in philosophy before he was ensnared by the first generation of New Hollywood filmmakers) and make you marinate in them. And sometimes that works and its brilliant and you are hailed as a genius. And sometimes it doesn't work and you are left with a gorgeous film that tries to express the totality of human nature and ends up spitting little pieces of it out instead.
