Reviewing the Reviewers: Who Killed Jesse James?
I don’t like to talk about box office totals much because they’re a meaningless measure of a film’s quality. On the other hand, in context they’re a good indicator of the public’s acceptance of this or that movie and when a movie I love tanks, I want to know why.
According to Box Office Mojo, as of Thursday, December 6, 2007, one of the best films of the year made less than $4 million in 11 weeks of release in the United States. Meanwhile, one of the worst movies of the year made almost $60 million on the first day it hit theaters. The two films are The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford and Spider-Man 3. If you’re wondering which is which, let’s just say that Spider-Man 3 probably outgrossed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in just the time it took me to say the latter’s title.
I know, a direct comparison isn’t really fair because these are two different movies with different expectations and a different target audience. Spider-Man 3 was a massively promoted sequel with a built-in audience that cost $258 million to produce. Jesse James was an arthouse Western that cost $30 million and would need all the help it could get in finding an audience. Still, when you’re measuring the size of a slice of pie, it’s interesting to know how big the slices can be. Spider-Man 3 happens to be the outside limit for 2007. By comparison, Jesse James was a crumb of crust.
It’s true, Jesse James was never designed to be a box office giant, but how did a movie starring Brad Pitt fair so poorly with audiences? Warner Brothers seemed skittish about this film from the very start. They’d signed on for a Western starring one of the biggest movie stars around and what they got was an art movie. If memory serves there were also problems with the length and once it was finished, the film sat on the shelf as the studio waited to release it in the fall ’serious season’.
When the film was finally released and ultimately peaked in only 301 theaters, it was reasonable to think the studio had simply dumped it. That was my first suspicion, but if Warner Brothers planned to dump it, why did they let it linger on the shelves for so long waiting for the right environment in which to release it? Why not just throw it into theaters as soon as it was ready?
Also, when the film first opened in 5 theaters in Los Angeles and New York, the per theater daily average over the weekend was less than $10,000. That’s not bad, but it’s not great. By comparison, No Country For Old Men averaged nearly $15,000 per theater. As of this writing, the Coen film has nearly crossed the $30 million mark and is still chugging along. The new film Juno was reported to have a Friday opening per theater average of $19,000.
It’s possible Warner Brothers simply did a poor job of marketing Jesse James, but there’s no way for me to establish that fact. What I can do is check to see what the critics were saying about it. I didn’t pay too much attention to critical reception at the time because I was already committed to seeing the movie, but looking back I’m shocked to find how poorly it was reviewed in so many of the major publications. Though it received a passable but low Metacritic rating of 68 and an OK overall 75% fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes, the Cream of the Crop approval rating was a surprisingly low 59%. Usually the more challenging films get a higher Cream of the Crop rating and a lower overall rating, but not Jesse James. It was being scorned by the very people who should’ve been championing it.
- In the pages of Salon, the usually reliable Stephanie Zacharek smirked: “If you care only about whodunit and not about how and why, ‘The Assassination of Jesse James’ isn’t for you. Then again, if you care even remotely about how and why — or even just about staying awake — ‘The Assassination of Jesse James’ really isn’t for you.” She goes on to compare it to watching a book on tape.
- Anthony Lane of The New Yorker adjusted his monacle and sniffed: “It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.”
- One of my favorite critics Manohla Dargis of the New York Times called it “an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor” that ” sinks under the heaviness of images so painstakingly art directed, so fetishistically lighted and adorned, that there isn’t a drop of life left in them”
- Crotchety Kenneth Turan’s LA Times dismissal opened: “Put in simplest terms, ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ is a film whose reach exceeds its grasp. Hugely ambitious and not without moments of success, this indulgent 2 hour and 40 minute epic ends up as unwieldy as its elongated title. It’s a movie in love with itself, and few things are more fatal than that.”
Frankly, critics who are incapable of sitting quietly in the dark for a few hours without crying about it should reconsider their careers. These aren’t second stringers. They’re important film critics representing the two largest cities in America and they greeted a work of genius with a collective yawn. They should be embarrassed. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but what good is a critic if they can’t help shepherd a challenging film on it’s way to audience acceptance? They’re a waste of column inches and newsprint. They’re expediting their own irrelevance.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is one of the finest movies of the year. Sight & Sound has just chosen it as one of 2007’s 10 best. It featured a career best performance from Brad Pitt, a worldwide celebrity and one of the industry’s biggest stars. Casey Affleck gave what would’ve been a star making performance if anyone had turned out to see it. Filling out the cast were easily half a dozen superb and memorable supporting performances including Paul Schneider, Sam Rockwell and Sam Shepard, The whole thing was beautifully photographed by the great Roger Deakins who delivered both stunning imagery and boundary pushing technique designed to serve the narrative. Last but not least was the outstanding score by Nick Cave. All the ingredients were there, all it needed was an audience.
Every few months it seems we see another article asking “Do critics matter?” It’s true they probably matter little to the mass-audience tent pole flicks like Spider-Man 3 and they matter even less to films aimed at the young like 300 or the stupid like Norbit or Wild Hogs. However, I think they still matter with the more intelligent, challenging films. They matter to the vast majority of adults who only see a handful of movies each year; the very audience who could’ve been taken by the hand and shown to their seats by positive reviews for a movie like Jesse James; positive reviews that didn’t materialize in enough numbers from the sources you’d expect, sources who should be capable of seeing this movie for work of genius that it was. Instead these tastemakers turned up their noses and turned their backs, audiences stayed away and one of the best movies of the year stiffed at the box office. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford will have to wait for the inevitable critical re-appraisal before it can enjoy its moment in the sun.
It’s possible this outcome may have been inevitable despite the reviews. Maybe Warner Brothers did drop the ball. Maybe audiences wouldn’t have shown up anyway. On the other hand, maybe the studio gave up because they could see the critical writing on the wall and it wasn’t good. Either way, if this was the Old West, Stephanie Zacharek, Anthony Lane, Manohla Dargis and Kenneth Turan would be wanted for aiding and abetting a crime against cinema. That’s a hanging offense in these parts.
Filed under: Analysis, Opinion
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- 30 Helens Agree: No Country is #1
- Sight & Sound’s Top 10 Films of 2007
- ASC Hearts Deakins (and you should too)
Yay! Week after next “Jesse James” finally limps into an art house theater an hour away from my little corner of the middle of nowhere. I finally get to fucking see it.
I find it hard to believe that if WB had put it out normally it would’ve stiffed. Pitt fans would’ve shown up, movie geeks would’ve shown up and Western fans, too.
I think what did the movie in is that it was so obviously shooting for greatness, and failing, though in my eyes only just. I was left with an overwhelming “almost” feeling, and as a consequence, my review was rather negative, despite the four star rating. I really want to see this film again and I think it will end up in my top 5 of the year (top 10 in any case), but…let me try to articulate it.
In poetry, a great poem is one in which you couldn’t imagine any word being added, removed, or replaced by a synonym. The same thing goes for novels, though maybe a bit less strongly: it’s not for nothing that Flaubert coined the term “le mot juste”. I believe a great movie, too, should feel like that: like nothing could be changed without spoiling it. No Country for Old Men gave me that feeling, and I’m not just talking about the dialogue: every scene was exactly the length it should be, every angle was perfect, every cut at exactly the right time. With The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, some things DID feel perfect: most notably the cinematography and the ending. But in the ending, I didn’t feel that definiteness (is that even a word?). I felt that this was only one of the incarnations of this film, and not necessarily the best one. The coda, most notably, felt either too long or much too short, and there were some instances before that as well.
Granted, this slight imperfection is no excuse for the hostility and cheap mockery of some of these reviews. But the almost-greatness might have been what they were responding to. They are film lovers, after all. Maybe it’s an optimistic thought. Maybe it’s naive. In any case, I do think there is a masterpiece in there, and who knows, it might come out on DVD someday.
I’m not ashamed to admit Jesse James kind of had its way with me, though I’ll never call a movie I’ve only seen once a masterpiece or a classic. The potential is there, but it’s too early to call.
Even if you accept that JJ isn’t perfect, I like to think a thoughtful person, especially one who watches movies for a living, could at least admire the artistry and the attempt at greatness. There was no call for the cranky dismissals. There’s just too much this one got right.
I’m normally more tolerant of people’s opinions. Different things work for different people, and that’s fine, but I really think JJ deserved more of a benefit of a doubt.
Cinema history is littered with movies that seemed like failures in their day but have since been embraced as classics. It’ll be interesting to see where JJ stands in 20 years or more.
It’s funny you mention the perfection of No Country. It wasn’t an instantly gratifying experience, but it felt like it was as it should be. There wasn’t a single thing I would’ve changed. The more I thought it over, the more gratifying it became. But then there were all these people saying the ending was ‘wrong’ and it ’sucked’ and it was ‘disappointing’ yet few if any of these people could articulate what they would’ve changed.
This wasn’t everyone’s idea of a good movie and that’s fine, but you can’t change a thing about it in my opinion.
Imagine how pissed I’d be if No Country was getting the crtiical Jesse James treatment!
Harvey. Yeah, I think WB is still culpable here, but I almost don’t blame them for being a little gunshy.
After all this build-up, I hope you like the movie.
(Sorry, your comment was held in moderation for some reason. You must’ve used a different email address?)
Couldn’t agree more with your well presented critique Craig. I’m still of the mind that Warner’s could have gone wider initially based on Pitt’s stardom. That would have given it a boost of a few million. Presumably that would outweigh the additional costs associated with the strategy - e.g. the cost of prints.
I considered that. In the Valley of Elah opened in 10 theaters with a slightly lower Metacritic score and a much lower Per Theater Averge. Despite that, it quickly expanded to over 900 theaters and managed almost $7 million. It wasn’t half the movie Jesse James was plus it had this whole supposed “anti Iraq movie” thing going against it. It also didn’t have anyone like Brad Pitt.
In the end, I can’t pretend to understand the business end of it. I can only try to guess why Warners did what they did and I think critical reception might have had something to do with it.
It’s my favorite film of the year and one of the essential American films of the decade. It’s amazing how these things happens sometimes. It’s like Roger Ebert (who I admire greatly) calling Heaven’s Gate “the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen” in his initial review. I wonder if he still stands by that opinion. There are spectacular, brilliant things about Heaven’s Gate. The same goes for The Assassination of Jesse James. Hopefully it builds an audience over the next few years. To quote Pitt’s iconic work as James. “it would only be right”.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting Ari.
Even if Ebert still doesn’t love Heaven’s Gate, surely he doesn’t think it’s a cinematic waste. That’s a good example of a film that has received a critical re-appraisal and the general consensus is that it isn’t as bad as its reputation and it’s actually pretty good.
The thing about Gate is that part of its reputation came from the reported production problems and the cost of the film. Jesse James actually cost less and it was made nearly 30 years later.
This wasn’t a big out of control ego production. By today’s standards, it was pretty modestly budgeted.
There is no way to tell for sure, but I think history will look back on Jesse James and realize it was misunderstood and underappreciated when it first came out.
It is the Barry Lyndon of Westerns.
Warner Bros’ marketing choices do deserve some criticism as it was reported in a few circles that they dumped the movie in third-tier release after it received a weak reception in NY and LA and movie towns like Seattle. The week it finally arrived here in Portland (and a number of other American cities), the Friday release wasn’t announced to the media until Tues evening which ensures that ads for the film won’t be featured in the Friday or weekend editions, a local critic’s preview won’t be scheduled, and the local weeklies won’t even have time to include a mention of it in their entertainment sections.
Warner Bros essentially scuttled the movie in smaller markets. I’m shocked to here it’s even still playing in any theaters anywhere in the country as the print that showed here wasn’t even moved to the second-run theaters in town. I think it lasted here for two weeks in one theater on one screen. It never even played Vancouver, which is across the river from Portland (and a fairly large city).
Further, it is now scheduled to receive a bare-bones DVD release with no extras or commentary, let alone the numerous deleted scenes (originally there were over 5 hours of scenes shot). It’s also not receiving a HiDef DVD release, which isn’t surprising so much as it’s just disappointing. A movie like this can only be discovered now on video and to see it’s being thrown together with so little attention is just sad.
Oh well, it seems like each year there’s a good movie that the studios are befuddled by and they dump on audiences without the proper support. Some of these movie eventually find an audience and survive (2006’s Little Children comes to mind) and some suffer as a result (2007’s Zodiac). Hopefully The Assassination of Jesse James will eventually find a supportive audience on video because it’s a film made for people who love film.
You’re right. And it’s important to remember how critics outside of LA and NY complained they weren’t given a proper chance to review the film before it opened in their cities.
There’s no question Warners gave up on it, but I can’t help but wonder, if early critical support had been there would they have tried harder?
We’ll never know now.
That sucks they’re not even giving it the HiDef DVD treatment. I suppose a special edition is still possible for an eventual double-dipping.
As far as I can tell, the movie itself is completely gone from theaters. I think it’s still showing once or twice a day in a shitbox near Beverly Hills as a last gasp attempt to get the Academy to pay attention, but that’s probably about it.
This is a dumping that was even worse than Zodiac or Children of Men. Both of those films made north of $30 million. Ten times what Jesse James cost and neither of those had Brad Pitt.
Crazy.
Confession, especially since I’m picking on movies you like today, I didn’t care for Children of Men. Loved Zodiac though. Both deserved better treatment than they got from their studios.
Seriously Chuck, I admire your stones for taking stands you know aren’t going to be popular in a certain group, but I never feel like you’re just doing it to be a pain in the ass.
We have disagreed on many movies, and it never has bothered me.
Here is an articleon JJ’s failure despite featuring Pitt.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117978128.html?categoryid=1019&cs=1
Sadly, other than noted that a hadful of recent films have failed at the box office despite its star power, the article offers no substantial analysis. The one really interesting fact was that Pitt and Ridley Scott cut their own version of the film!
I read that article yesterday and was very disappointed that their analysis was so lacking.
In some ways, the death of JJ is one of the big movie stories of the year as far as I’m concerned yet all Variety could say about it was “Gee, stars are no guarantee of box office!” Yeah, no shit.
What they didn’t mention is that the movie only cost 30 million and Brad Pitt took an enormous pay cut just to be in it.
No where do they even attempt to explain what happened.