The Assassination of Jesse James …

One measure of a film, we have found, is how much we talk about it afterwards. When we came out of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford yesterday,  Maureen and I could hardly stop talking. I think it achieves what Terrence Mallick thought he was doing with The New World, making the landscape tell the story. The camera dwells lovingly on grass swaying in the wind, on snow-coated fields, on a frozen river, on stark mountains and dark forests and muddy city streets, and yet, unlike with Mallick’s film, you don’t grow tired of the slowness but rather relish it because it works, it all ties together, it propels the story forward in a way that makes you unwilling to look away even for a moment. Seeing these shabby cabins huddled at the bottom of bare slopes you understand everything that shaped these people.

New World

At one point, probably about a third of the way into Terrence Malick’s ravishingly beautiful but inordinately slow film, The New World, Maureen leant towards me and whispered: ‘Not so much manifest destiny as manifest bollocks.’ Let that be our judgement on the film.