And games that never amount to more than they're meant will play themselves out

I meant to put up this post last night, but my brain closed up shop first. (And now the hour of Oscar approaches, which I may or may not watch this year. I have seen more nominated films than ever before in my life.) Last night we watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I loved it; I had not expected to. But while I know nothing about the novel from which the screenplay was adapted, the finished film reminded me of nothing so much as Angela Carter's "The Fall River Axe Murders" or "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe"—a fantasia on the life of Robert Ford and the death of Jesse James, grounded in such historical detail that it feels simultaneously naturalistic and stylized, which is some kind of neat trick.

It is not stagy, because there are shots that could only be composed on film, but it is theatrical. There's a narrator who exists outside the frame of the film, who communicates to the audience facts to which the characters are not privy and occasionally admits to gaps in the historical record. The cinematography has the kind of fetishistic specificity that charges ordinary objects with significance, clouds, a grainfield under snow, the hands of a clock, a coffee cup stirred with a spoon, lightstruck and anatomized like holy relics; it would be over-the-top except that it works. "Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them," the narrator tells us of Jesse James, in the very first lines of the film. "Rain fell straighter. Clocks slowed. Sounds were amplified." We will observe these phenomena in action and they do not feel like plodding literalism, over-concretized metaphors, they feel like the truth. (Outside, above, in the already burning air, see! the angel of death roosts on the roof-tree.) You see everything, even if you cannot yet tell what is a Chekhovian gun on the wall and what is simply the all-tabulating eye of the cinematographer or the writer. In some scenes, it becomes oppressive; in others, it's simply beautiful. Always it reminds you that this is how things happened, even if they didn't.

And there is the man who shot Jesse James himself, Robert Ford, who even in a film in which he takes up the majority of the screen time receives second billing. Historical irony, eat your heart out.

( Either you are a saint; or a stranger. )

And if for any conceivable reason a film should need to be made of "John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore," Andrew Dominik is the man I nominate to make it.