Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel) A Film by Ingmar Bergman (1961)

Almost unfathomably, Ingmar Bergman managed to extract a different atmosphere out of his beloved Fårö Island for each film he shot there. His exterior shots of gentle waves hitting the scattered rocks or the shoreline punctuated by a miniature summer house are usually composed in extremely similar ways, however, the context of each film brings unique dimensions to the environments. In Persona, Fårö nearly seems sunny and enjoyable to contrast from the competitive tension mounting in its characters. Hour of the Wolf's Fårö is utterly frightening, a brooding bearer of bad memories and mysterious people. In Through a Glass Darkly, the first installment in his Silence of God trilogy, the island seems like it exists at the end of the world. The four characters have little immediate connection to what exists outside their remote summer retreat (besides the novelist father David's (Gunnar Björnstrand) discussions of book signings and the helicopter which arrives remedially at the end), so the island takes on an empty, drifting remoteness that works perfectly as a vehicle for the characters to console in each other or, as it frequently and detrimentally works out, themselves.

When placed aside the two films that followed, Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963), Through a Glass Darkly may be the lesser effort. However, when Bergman reminisced about the "trilogy" decades later, he believed the tagging of the films as a trilogy was something that came about in the primitive stages of development, and upon completion, that the films had less thematic parallels than they were described as having. Granted, most of Bergman's films are about faith and isolation to some extent, but perhaps Through a Glass Darkly is best viewed, at least thematically, through a different lens than that of its successors. Otherwise, the film is similar in its small ensemble character study foundations and its ascetic visual approach.

In Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman places a dysfunctional family in a spiritual freeze; there is Karin (a scintillating performance by Bergman regular Harriet Andersson), a gleaming schizophrenic recently released from a mental hospital, Martin (Max Von Sydow), her endlessly loving husband with a lack of faith, David, the writer exploiting Karin's sickness for the sake of his art, and Minus (Lars Passgård), Karin's hopeful, neglected brother who shares an almost incestuous relationship with her. Nearly everyone holds a secret about another. Minus has bitterness towards his father, Martin scorns David for his insensitive attempts at artistic truth, and David deprecates himself when confronted about his falseness. These inner family battles only send Karin into retrograde motion, propounded by her discovery of David's journal. Like a psychic gripped by a celestial insight, she convulses in the spare upstairs bedroom, her eyes clinging to the door behind which she claims she has seen God. Her movements and gestures are utterly disturbing; Andersson truly plumbs the soul of a schizophrenic with her disconnected squirming and illogical, shape-shifting actions. At one point, Minus finds her lying blankly beneath the deck of a small boat toppled beside the shore (a visually compelling scene with dripping water and rays of light). He embraces her limp body remorsefully, partly out of brotherly affection but also out of an insistence upon proving his love for her to his father as a way of attempting to receive love in return.

In what Bergman describes as the "epilogue" - but which is really just the ending - David does offer guidance to his son, explaining rather banally and explicitly his take on the nature of God. Minus responds prosaically: "Daddy spoke to me." This is unevenly didactic in relation to the subtlety of the rest of the film, but fortunately it does not completely damage the power of the finale. Bergman asserts that the return of Karin's disease was possibly caused by a lack of love, and therefore an intangibility of God. Sven Nykvist's cinematography is absolutely remarkable in Through a Glass Darkly as well; his extremely perceptive use of contrast and shadow on the faces of the characters beautifully counterbalances the weight of the familial crisis.

Twin Peaks (1990 TV Series) By David Lynch and Mark Frost

Every episode of Twin Peaks commences with the same sappy, tacky credit sequence, one that manages to act as the kind of cozy pleasure that is so often established only to implode upon itself in David Lynch's work. Angelo Badamalenti's sentimental keyboard anthem rings over featherlight shots of the woods, a gentle stream, a classic town welcome sign, and the giant waterfall that rages beside the town's inviting hotel, "The Great Northern". There are also tight images of the gears pumping away in the local lumber mill, which gently asserts itself as the backbone of the entire series, aesthetically and narratively. Twin Peaks has a very mechanical, strained quality to it, as clearly a product of human creation as the gears and saws that spin inexorably in close-up. This is nothing new in Lynch's work, as his films often extend laughably "over-directed" scenarios, but his work on this early 90's television show is some of his most deconstructive in terms of the creation of his own cinema and cinema in general; the bulk of the show is set up like a nauseatingly melodramatic small-town murder mystery, but in Lynch's unceasingly creative world there is biting parody, and, to disrupt the comfortable flow, the cryptic surrealism he is most loved for.

Over its 30-episode run, Twin Peaks tells two different stories, interchanged midway through the show's run. The two directions the show takes are loosely linked and are best looked at separately. In its first few episodes, the show presents Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan, who is the knight in shining armor throughout, a quintessentially "good" character and a moral prototype for the rest of the town), who arrives in the northwestern town of Twin Peaks to investigate the shocking, incomprehensible murder of the well-respected high school homecoming queen, Laura Palmer. The initial season depicts Cooper gradually unlocking the cumbersome, elusive mystery, which is finally solved a few episodes into the second season. After this, the plot line branches out into a yarn dealing with the mystical powers of the Twin Peaks' woods and a battle of wits between the corporate king of the town, Ben Horn (Richard Beymer), and the sly owner of the lumber mill, Catherine Martell (Piper Laurie). A legion of fanzines would avidly discuss theories on who killed Laura Palmer, so when the momentum that the show carried for so long disintegrated into a new act, Twin Peaks undeniably lost critical and commercial steam. To add to this, Lynch himself became disgruntled by the network airing the show (ABC) and therefore ceased to direct many of the episodes that followed the revelation of Laura Palmer's murderer.

In the pre-revelation stages of the show, Lynch molds the plot around rather conventional soap drama/mystery tactics. As well as advancing the expanding mystery, half of the time is spent simply finding a firm footing in the kind of sanitary small-town environment Lynch is known for being attracted to, evidenced most tellingly by Blue Velvet. A laundry list of characters is introduced (far too many to mention here) that all seem to know each other personally. People act in an uncommonly cordial way, and their motivations and interests rarely extend further than their tightly knit community. For instance, there is Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), who is devoted solely to running the town smoothly and loving his mysterious Asian girlfriend with sinister ties, Josie Packard (Joan Chen); the town's angelic diner manager, Norma Jennings (Peggy Lipton), who never fails to speak in a soft, reassuring manner to her customers; and Donna Hayword (Lara Flynn Boyle), the loyal best friend of Laura Palmer who transforms from sincere investigator to femme fatale and back again without ever losing her interest in understanding the town's myriad of secrets. The bulk of Lynch and co-producer Mark Frost's characters have a hilarious quirk or two, Cooper's being his boundless enthusiasm for simple pleasures such as black coffee and cherry pie. Elsewhere, Jack Nance, whose sullen face permeates Lynch's macabre debut, Eraserhead, plays Catherine Martell's down-to-earth husband Pete but still manages to project surreal, awkward character traits that rub off on those around him. Perhaps the oddest of them all is the "Log Lady", an uptight woman with thick-framed glasses who shows up everywhere with a log slung across her bosom and provides before the start of every show kitschy musings or nonsensical anecdotes that outline in some way the theme of the coming episode.



From very early on, Twin Peaks declares its intentions: Lynch does not want it to be an average television show. In the second episode, Agent Cooper has an outlandish dream that provides clues that assist him in his investigation. Of course the clues are vague and nearly unworkable (as they are in all of his hallucinations), but Cooper is whispered to by a somnambulistic Laura some sort of divine knowledge that allows him to pursue the case intuitively. Within this dream, some of the most memorable images of the show and indeed of Lynch's oeuvre are introduced. A seemingly never-ending labyrinth of red curtains and alternating, jagged black and white floor tiles are home to the spirits of many of the characters involved in the case, only they are bereft of any life and speak in a jumbled, disconcerting manner (which is achieved by the actors learning their lines in reverse and the sound being manipulated later). A well-primped midget dances smoothly around the rooms to Badalamenti's dreamy jazz tunes, speaking in a coded language to a now elderly Cooper who just stares intently in hopes of picking up any semblance of cogency. The first time we enter this dream world, titled "The Black Lodge", it is as unexpected as it is thrilling. Unfortunately, it does not return until the final episode, which certainly contains the most brilliant moments that the show has to offer. Granted, it was Lynch's return to direction after a disappointingly prolonged leave of absence.

Periodically, yet only when Lynch is at the wheel, Twin Peaks does drift back into dream logic. The no-name directors who attempt to insert Lynchian surreality into the plot only end up achieving lukewarm thrills, incapable of harnessing the unabashed originality of Lynch's vision. Several times Cooper is also greeted enigmatically by a giant wearing suspenders who moans inexplicable clues like "without chemicals, he points". The entire set that Cooper is inhabiting tends to darken and the soundtrack shifts to a deep synthesizer hum to signal the arrival of the giant, who fades in a la superimposition and stands toweringly above Cooper via baroque camera angles. His two most stunning appearances come during the performance of a jazz singer in deep red lipstick (think Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet) at a midnight show and in Cooper's hotel room after being shot and greeted in a cheery yet oddly insincere manner by an old room service attendant (a hilarious example of Lynch's use of deadpan comedy). Unsettling as these scenes are, they don't show up often enough to balance out the amount of otiose melodrama that is present in the episodes.



One of the almost painfully dull attributes of the show is the numerous romances that are glazed over. Donna Hayword has what seems like an eternal pact with the gleaming, virile, hopelessly grave and contemplative James Hurley (James Marshall), formed out of their mutual lament for the death of their close friend (and in James' case, lover) Laura. The two of them share a love song that James sings 50's style, utilizing only a guitar and a microphone drenched in reverb. Their relationship comes across as schmaltzy and unrealistic, two high-school students with an unbelievable amount of insight into the metaphysical aspects of friendship and community, and the mawkish music that accompanies their scenes together does not help. Another waitress at the town diner, Shelly Johnson (played by the beautiful Mädchen Amick), leaves her malicious trucker husband Leo (Eric DaRe, who is involved in much of the sinister underworld of Twin Peaks) to be cheaply wooed by the typically rebellious high school football captain Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook). While these cheeky romances are usually overtly hammed up in the interest of parody when Lynch directs, they feel as if they are common ground for the other directors that grace the show, and therefore do more to degrade than to provoke laughter.

The problem with aiming for art on television is that television is available to such a wide range of viewers that networks do not want to risk airing a program that could be considered daring or provocative. The open-ended finale of Twin Peaks is just that, although it's rather bittersweet considering the span of episodes Lynch seemed not to be heavily involved with. Upon realizing that the program was dipping itself into ever deeper mysteries that seemed unnecessary to package up, Lynch took it upon himself to finalize the show's run in a boisterous fashion. Unfortunately, this results in several ambiguities regarding expedited relationship quarrels that were introduced in the concluding three episodes; Donna's confusion over her real parents, the stress of James Hurley's father's wife Nadine- who'd been in a nostalgic trance for a lengthy amount of time after an attempted suicide - after springing back to life only to realize her husband is with another woman, Bobby and Shelly's relationship future, Sheriff Harry S. Truman's jumbled state following the death of Josie, and Pete and Catherine's uncertain marriage are all left dangling to be ruminated on by the audience. However, it is difficult to say what impact these unanswered questions have on the meaning of the story as a whole, if any at all. It feels like a "get-out-of-jail-free" card played by Lynch out of desperation to finish the work he started but was getting fed up with. The undeniably interesting ambiguity is the complete and utter reversal of Dale Cooper due to being hosted by the menacing enigma "Bob" (the snickering evil, manifested by ominous owls, indirectly responsible for the deaths of both Laura Palmer and Josie Packard, and the threatening injuries inflicted upon Cooper's newly developed love, Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham)) following his trip to the eerie woods of Twin Peaks.



On the whole, Twin Peaks is thoroughly engaging, comedic, and frightening if only sporadically shameful and sentimental. The cult status it achieved feels wholly reciprocated given its unusual credo of television as art. In its finest moments, the show does come the closest I've experienced to American television, even major network television, as art. The contributions across the board are inspired and unique; of course Lynch's direction is wholesome and visionary, Badalamenti's score is terrifically coherent (if at times annoyingly intrusive), MacLachlan's acting is top notch, Nance's character is hilariously histrionic, and the screenplay work (divided up between Mark Frost, Lynch, Barry Pullman, Harley Peyton, Robert Engels, and a few others) is invigoratingly complex and takes a number of ambitious turns. Although you'll spend half the time scratching your head trying to figure out who killed Laura Palmer and subsequently becoming bothered by the story's new direction, you'll eventually become swept up by a whole new string of mysteries inside the seemingly perfect world of Twin Peaks.

Eastern Promises (2007) A Film by David Cronenberg

In David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Viggo Mortensen says he's "just a driver". However, there is a charismatic coolness on the surface of his Nikolai that disguises the tight rope of loyalties he must balance towards his fellow Russian mobsters and towards Anna (Naomi Watts), a midwife required to handle a dying woman during childbirth whose diary of heinous chronicles leads her directly to the Vory V Zakone (the old-world Russian mafia stationed in London). The film marks the second straight pairing of Cronenberg and Mortensen, and while it may represent a slightly more commercial bent than what is expected of Cronenberg, the fusion is tantalizing.

Mortensen is outstanding as the chauffeur Nikolai, mustering up believable Russian mannerisms to coincide with his phlegmatic Russian accent. The intricate tattoos covering his chest (standing in as Cronenberg's motif for his characteristic interest in the human body) detail years of unwieldy criminal experience, but by the same token, he possesses a sliver of humanity that proves, in the end, enough to break his calculated, know-it-all smugness. Through the mob victim's diary, which must be translated with some difficulty for Anna, she learns that it was the Vory who was responsible for the trafficking crimes and that the father of the baby is likely Kirill (Vincent Cassel, who recalls Reinhold from Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz), the drunkard son of the crime lord Semyon.

Watts' character stands in for the audience, jostled from the ordinary life she leads with her parents after a damaging divorce to investigate the story of the woman. She is inevitably lured into the subculture of the mafia, partly out of a confident search for justice but perhaps also out of a mysterious curiosity further propounded by Mortensen's swaggering allure. Her parents, and most specifically her brutish father (played by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski), dissuade her from getting involved with the mob or attempting to swing any deals.

Although Anna's story is an essential plot element, taking us within the Vory V Zakone in the first place, the triptych of Nikolai, Kirill, and Semyon is the crux of the film. Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is the ubiquitous, dominating figure who manages to dodge a crime boss caricature, resulting instead in a seemingly benevolent restaurant owner who unleashes quiet intensity behind closed doors. He is most often angered by his suspicion of Kirill's homosexuality, and to a degree there is indeed pent up homoeroticism imbued in the film. Kirill frequently accuses Nikolai of being a queer, but at the same time hangs on desperately during their embraces. He is also expedient in his willingness to order Nikolai around forcefully (he is the upper hand), likely aroused by a jealousy that stems from Semyon's preference of Nikolai to him. Therefore, there are oedipal as well as erotic impulses that are repressed or projected elsewhere for Kirill.

Eastern Promises is successfully as much of a textured ensemble study as it is a shockingly violent, searingly tense portrait of the Russian mob in London. It has been suggested by some that Cronenberg has lost intrigue as a director due to his excursion into more "mainstream" fare, but what A History of Violence and Eastern Promises make up is a new development in Cronenberg's career, one that favors measured pacing over the freewheeling bizarreness that typifies his earlier Sci-Fi work. The film is by no means a commercial film as far as I'm concerned; the only real outbreak of elongated violence occurs during a brilliantly staged bathhouse sequence - which features a nude Mortensen held at knife-point by two shady figures - and it eschews the pounding music that may have accompanied the scene under the wing of a generic director. In fact, the scene would not have been considered by another director in the first place. Eastern Promises is by all accounts a Cronenberg film, still withholding the ability to make an audience squirm and think at the same time.

Heart of Glass (Herz au Glas) A Film by Werner Herzog (1974)

Heart of Glass is quite unlike much of anything I've seen. It is rambling but sublimely beautiful, excruciatingly slow but curiously enthralling, plotless yet carved out of a simple Bavarian folk legend, and gimmicky but intuitive. The entire cast (lest the prophet Hias) performs under hypnosis induced by director Werner Herzog, constituting one of the bravest conceptual decisions by a seminal director who otherwise has eaten a shoe, dragged a ship over a mountain, leaped into a cactus patch, and would most likely climb K2 naked if he had the chance.

The barest scrape of a story is conjured; in a Gothic, pre-industrial Bavarian village, a glass factory owner dies without a chance to pass down his renowned secret recipe for producing ruby glass and therefore sets off a moral crisis in the town - hammered home most tellingly by the younger glass mill owner who comes to fetishize the art of the secret - and elicits the arrival of an apocalypse-dwelling prophet. It's difficult to decipher most of the drivel that slips of out of the mouths of the hypnotized actors, thus causing elusiveness, but this is often precisely what adds magic to the film. Herzog was enthused by the idea of presenting people on the screen in a way that we have never seen them before, and the somnambulistic lull that results is indeed mystifying, less a form of Bressonian stiffness and more a warped Theater of the Absurd. Characters stare blankly, laugh uncontrollably, scream awkwardly, smash beer glasses on each other's heads, and wear droning patinas of gloom on their faces at all times in a way that brings to mind Roy Andersson's work. In one scene in a bar room, men sit posed like statues, the grave stillness in the room a poetic image of a civilization that refuses to fix its problems, declining rapidly while vainly fiddling with silly things like a glassblowing secret. Hias sees things on a global, even spiritual level, which is evoked in a nonsensically pessimistic way but reaches a sense of hope by the final scene, an anecdote about a group of spirited thinkers living on a rock island who finally decide after years of rumination to set off on canoe to discover whether or not the Earth is flat.

Heart of Glass is essentially an example of Herzog's conceit. The film is relentlessly formal and concept-based; most scenes unfold with a small number of cuts and the fixed, detached gaze echoes Bela Tarr (one bar scene involves a man playing a bizarre accordion-like instrument) and Tsai Ming-Liang's work. Herzog also periodically inserts stunning nature footage of the misty, mountainous Bavarian landscape to the kind of operatic accapella music he so frequently utilizes. There are a number of truly astounding images of hyperspeed fog rolling over trees, through swamps, over gorges, and around waterfalls. The film is at its most transcendent in such instances, when Herzog takes a break from his often times frustratingly oblique tale and does what he does best: capture "adequate images of our civilization". This phrase has an applicable ring to it as well; although the film takes place in Gothic ages, we are viewing a village that can be seen as a microcosm of human civilization as a whole. His recent succession of environmentally aware documentaries would certainly substantiate this.

Pitfall (Otoshiana) A Film by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1962)

Pitfall hurriedly opens as if it was spliced out of the middle of a Japanese thriller, however the scene is silent with the exception of the invariable sound of a vigorous saw thrusting through a log. Hiroshi Teshigahara presents a father and son on the run - dodging around shadowy corners and through dimly lit streets - without the stylistic checkpoints such a scene may usually contain. Rather, his unsettling sound design and stark images create an otherworldly mood which sustains itself for more or less the rest of the film, the first entry in his existential trilogy based off Kôbô Abe novels. Oddly, the film has theatrical origins, but Teshigahara - with his inimitable jack-of-all-trades touch - transforms it into something that only seems fit for the screen, a cinematic amalgam of capitalist critique, alienation study, a deceitful thriller, and a surprisingly anti-frightening ghost story.

We discover soon enough that the man on the run is actually a migrant miner, skipping from job to job in constant fear of the harsh industry. He is followed ominously by a stone-faced man in a white suit and hat who is first seen by the young son taking a photograph of them behind distant plants. While on a mission to join a new agency he was appointed to, he finds only an abandoned mining town where a lonely woman (much like the one in Woman in the Dunes) sells candy. On a stroll through the barren terrain, he discovers the man in the white suit following him relentlessly until he is chased into tall grass and murdered. Because of his shady enigma, it's tempting to paint the murderer as a symbolic figure, but the film also hints that he's caught up in a corporate mix-up, thinking the miner is actually his doppelganger, a member of one of the halves of a split worker's union. Through a haunting use of backward slow motion, the man awakes as a ghost only to have the inevitable confirmed: ghosts cannot communicate with the living and are damned to spend the entirety of their postmortem existences in whatever state they were in at death. Nonetheless, the man strives for justice, following and peaking in at the conversations that make up his murder investigation. He prods, screams, stares, and suffocates the inspectors in a fruitless attempt to leak the truth. Finally, once the candy vendor is also killed by the enigmatic man, he can explain himself to someone in spite of the fact that the woman is deeply confused after seeing the man's doppelganger and therefore questioning the murder itself.

Amidst all of this, Teshigahara visually interprets Abe's themes of the nature of existence by treating the living and the dead with near equivalence; the ghosts are wholly capable of human emotion, their self-immersion and insistence upon explaining their fate mirrors the miner's greed, and there are no horrific connotations assigned to them. We see two separate, analogous worlds (living and nonliving) inhabiting one ghostly town which seems to hold no place in either. As usual with the Japanese artist, Pitfall is visually confounding cinema, a disconcerting journey into Kafkaesque surrealism filtered through a documentary-like attentiveness. There are mesmerizing shots of the endless cabins in the ravaged mining town, brief spurts of newsreel footage, unexpected special effects, and of course more macro images of bugs. The film is never as coherent and ultimately affecting as Woman in the Dunes, his acclaimed follow-up to Pitfall, because of its ambitious willingness to bounce around the narrative so freely, but we still get Teshigahara, Takemitsu, and Abe at their most inspired.

Umberto D. (1952) A Film by Vittorio De Sica

"A dog is a man's best friend" is a sentiment that has never been portrayed more aptly than it is in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. A monumental contribution to the Italian neorealist movement, the film chronicles Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a retired pensioner living off scraps in a one-room apartment he is in danger of being evicted from, and his adorably faithful dog Flike. Umberto is played by a non-professional named Carlo Battisti whose humane performance - one that he looks born for - almost guarantees no future acting repertoire. His existence, like many other elders (as shown in the opening protest), is marred by the difficult Italian postwar economic situation and the depersonalizing nature of modernity. Friendship, or simply human contact, does not come easily for Umberto; his snappy landlady, racked by bourgeois sensibilities, rudely reminds him constantly of his debts, the maid (also portrayed unprofessionally) hints at loyalty but is too weary-eyed and plain to be reliable, and the long-lost business partners he meets on his way are too self-absorbed to offer assistance. Throw in a cute and saintly dog to the mix and you have the ideal ingredients for an immodest weeper. However, Vittorio De Sica, who made his claim with the similarly honest The Bicycle Thief, deals with his subject with utmost matter-of-factness, supplementing overtly political material (the protest, community hospital sequences, a brutal dog pound) with pragmatic daily life (the maid's morning routine and Umberto's domestic struggle).

Sometimes De Sica's techniques mirror those of current contemplative filmmakers in his willingness to let his camera sit still and watch deliberately uninteresting activities at the expense of entertainment. For this, I commend his revolutionary courage (Italy produced loads of costume dramas and historical epics during this period). At the same time, I condemn the film's manipulative use of a typical movie score to stitch together the action; it seems De Sica stole a trick from the very films he was against and undermined the purity he was aiming for. This is a minor criticism though, for there is so much compassion in this film that it is rather easy to forgive a blemish or two.

Umberto D. is extremely understanding of its titular character and his relevant predicament. In the final and most heart-rending act, Umberto departs from his longtime apartment with a loose plan of lending his beloved dog to a trusty caretaker and subsequently ending his life. He approaches a haggard alleyway where a couple keeps scurrying dogs for money and, after inquiring about the price, he finds himself in a moral pickle. Umberto watches Flike cling to his leg while being growled at by the couple's bulldog a first time and musters up enough willpower to continue asking questions regarding the well-being of the dogs. All of his dignity teeters during this. The second time Flike whines by his ankle, the power of companionship pushes him to forget the negotiation and walk away. Although he continues his wrenching pursuit for Flike's new owner in a culminating sequence of brilliant emotional exchanges, this particular scene is the most telling example of De Sica's empathetic understanding: the pressures of socioeconomic struggles cannot overcome human dignity.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) A Film by Andrew Dominik

There is certain grandeur in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a treatment of the Western landscape as a lively vacuum that warps men into pawns or legends that recalls Terrence Malick's terrific romantic saga, Days of Heaven. The film's director, Andrew Dominik, seems to be heavily influenced by Malick in his refusal to deal with the written-on-the-wind outlaw Jesse James in a banal biopic manner, opting instead for a lyrical, meditative psychological study of the relationship of two men. As the lengthy title bluntly puts it, the film is studying Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) and his idol Jesse James (Brad Pitt), whom Robert finally gets the chance to meet when his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell) finds himself working in James' gang. Languorously, Dominik shows us the long days following James' final train robbery, when he invites the Ford brothers to stake out at his home with his wife and kids.

We watch Robert's unceasing fascination with James evolve into hero worship, and then fall down into jealous one-upping, prompted by the kick Charley gets out of teasing his brother for the collection of James memorabilia he owned growing up (he is only 20 in the film). Affleck's character's fetishes make for a prime example of the kind of romanticizing of men that featured prominently in late 1800's America. There was a powerful admiration for outlaws like Jesse who valued the greater good with little acknowledgment of the law. The film however, manages to de-sensationalize James, showing his base humanity, a rough, unpredictable (even psychotic) enigma. Pitt's portrayal of him is the finest of his career; underneath his coy smile lays a veil of uncertainty that is always vulnerable to erupt into hyena-like snickering or violent, in-your-face seriousness. Affleck also does one hell of a job as Ford, the slicked-haired, creepy young coward whose final attempt to bond himself with his idol is murder. The assassination scene is curious psychologically: in a living room with daylight pouring in, Pitt trudges over to a painting to dust it off while Affleck raises up the shimmering pistol that James just lent him for his birthday. James seems to have an awareness that he will be shot, or he is just testing Robert, or it is possible that he wants to end his life, because when Ford clicks the trigger in the silent room, James stiffly remains in his spot, dusting off the painting that clearly doesn't require immediate dusting.

After this taut scene, the film concludes with the life of Robert - now known nationally for his notorious crime - who eternally relives the murder through his theatrical rendering of it. This culminating act is also when the literary third-person narration (one of Dominik's troublesome choices) takes full steam, unfortunately explaining eloquently much of the depth that the film reveals more cinematically. Director of Photography Roger Deakins does a flawless job capturing the imposing countryside, frequently providing artful images of wheat fields, threatening skies, and snowy stretches of land. In fact, I think his gorgeous work here slightly improves on his showing in No Country for Old Men. Unfortunately, critics too often focus on the titanic length of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (160 minutes), which I think scares viewers away. The length serves the epic sweep properly, and while there are some empty stretches, there is enough complex characterization in the film - and an acknowledgment of the dangers of allowing idolatry to slip into worship - to overcome any minor flaws.