Andrew Dominik is good at showing how badly people want a famous man's attention, and how cruelly it can be withheld. We rate his patient attention to actors, though he sometimes keeps watching after the scene has made its point.
Fi1m perspective
Casey Affleck's Robert Ford watches Brad Pitt's Jesse James as though being noticed might settle everything. In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Andrew Dominik lets that need persist until it becomes difficult to watch. We felt uncomfortable because Ford's ordinary wish for recognition gives James such an easy way to hurt him. The film is absorbing, provided there is patience for scenes that return to feelings already made clear.
The interest in notorious men was there in his feature debut, Chopper (2000), about Australian criminal Mark 'Chopper' Read. Seven years later, he adapted Ron Hansen's novel for the western, making men's attempts to read one another carry much of the tension. Killing Them Softly (2012) kept him in crime drama.
His collaborators make that patience worthwhile. Roger Deakins's soft landscape photography gives the western an appeal that Pitt's ruthless, paranoid James keeps troubling: it is possible to enjoy the legend while disliking the man. Production designers Patricia Norris and Richard Hoover furnish settings that repay the long looks, while Norris's restrained costumes keep the people credible. Pitt scarcely needs to do anything to hold Ford's attention, and Dominik understands how much tension that imbalance supplies. Even the quieter exchanges can feel cruel, although the hushed dialogue occasionally makes listening harder than it should be.
The documentaries allow a gentler kind of attention. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have worked with Dominik as composers and documentary subjects; One More Time with Feeling (2016) treats Cave's grief and creative process with care. Blonde (2022), his fictionalised Marilyn Monroe portrait adapted from Joyce Carol Oates's novel, returns to the difference between a public image and a private person. That film's bleakness makes it a less inviting introduction to his work.
For an introduction, the western is the recommendation, with one practical caveat: it runs to 160 minutes. Affleck and Pitt carry its slack passages, but they cannot make every repetition necessary. Save it for an evening when nobody needs it to hurry.
Biography
Andrew Dominik (born 7 October 1967) is a New Zealand-born Australian film director and screenwriter. He was raised in Australia from the age of two and graduated from Swinburne Film School in Melbourne.
Dominik made his feature debut with the crime film Chopper (2000), which he wrote and directed, winning the AACTA Award for Best Direction. He followed this with the Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), which he also wrote and directed. His other notable works include the neo-noir crime film Killing Them Softly (2012), the documentary One More Time with Feeling (2016), episodes of the series Mindhunter (2017), and the biographical drama Blonde (2022).
