In the indie spirit of not wanting to follow in the grotesque footsteps of the the fickle crowd, in this season – this Oscar season – where award fans like to look ahead to the film awards and which awards will be awarded to which award winning filmmakers to be, I’ve decided to take a look back back, deep deep into the eyes eyes of the Ghost of Oscars past.
This semi-regular feature is called ‘New Country for Gold Men’, which is a self-admittedly phenomenal drop of punnage.
And first up…
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Wins: 0
Nominations 2
Best Supporting Actor: Casey Affleck (lost to Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men)
Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins (lost to Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood)
The plot
A great film with an excellent, yet tough to recall, title, The Assimilation of Jimmy Jim by the Idiot Bobby Whashisname is the account of Jesse James’s’s last year and a half. The legendary wild west outlaw (soberingly played by Brad Pitt) is no longer the man that carved a cult from his train robbing, moidering antics. In his mid-thirties – but looking double that, with unhealed bullet wounds and gammy eyes – he knows that he and his infamous gang are coming to the end of the dusty road.
Time to settle down with his family perhaps, but not before plucky, fresh-faced peckerwood Robert Ford (Affleck) begs and nuisances his way into the mob. Having grown up hero-worshiping James, he worms his way into his idol’s affections, before becoming disillusioned with the outlaw and his ways which are, primarily yet not exclusively, outside of the realms of the law. The temptation of the law enforcement dollar soon becomes too appealing to resist and the titular cowardly assassinating soon kicks in.
The nominations
First things first, Casey Affleck’s performance is utterly splendid. In his thirties when he played the role, he captures the bewilderment, vulnerability and reckless ambition of a nineteen-year-old entering an overwhelming community, with bags of believability. When he whines like a recalcitrant toddler, you want to give him a clip round the ear and send him to bed without any gruel. When he pines, with misty eyes, about his dream to be James’s heir-apparent, one swells with pride. And he has a look in his eyes, when being humiliated at the expense of the older gang members, that makes you want to give him a big old hug and tell him that everything will be all right and that he’s double the man that they’ll ever be.
(Spoilers, man)
This is Affleck’s opus, and it is difficult to imagine him making such a significant impact in a film again, for he is in virtually every scene.
And therein lies my issue with his nomination…how can one possibly suggest even for a minute that he is a supporting actor. This film is about Robert Ford, pure and simple. His name’s in the title, for cripes sake. It’s an injustice to Affleck and to all other potential nominees for the studio to suggest that his role is anything but a lead one, and I am delighted that his happened to coincide with one cinema’s iconic performances, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh.
This isn’t the first time this has happened (see Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain for a recent parallel) and it won’t be the last. It’s a blatant grasp at awards that, in this instance, saw the likes of Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), Max Von Sydow (Diving Bell and the Butterfly), J.K. Simmons (Juno) and Sacha Baron Cohen (Sweeney Todd) miss out. True supporting roles, each more deserving of a spot in the category than Affleck.
Roger Deakins, on the other hand, fully deserved his nomination. TAOJJBTCRF is a remarkably good looking film. While the sweeping Missouri landscapes are breathtaking, the low-lit night scenes (see below) amplify the paranoia of the characters. That said, for me, the choice to switch randomly between gorgeous ochre palettes and black-and-white was inexplicable and jarring.
2008 saw Deakins pick up his sixth and seventh Oscar nominations (he now has nine, somehow without a single win), as his similarly impressive work on No Country for Old Men also garnered a nomination. In any other year, either one of these films would surely have been sufficient for the award, but Robert Elswit’s incredible looking work for Paul Thomas Anderon’s There Will Be Blood was deemed better.
And the presence of the two behemoths No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are probably the reason why TAOJJBTCRF failed to get any further recognition. There is an argument that it should have found a spot in the top-five as a Best Picture nominee, a suggestion that I’m sympathetic to on the basis that the stink-fest Michael Clayton was included and, despite the weight of NCFOM and TWBB, 2007 was a fairly weak year. Only The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Gone Baby Gone would have been its only other contenders, and under the new rules I imagine all three would have qualified.
A quick word for Brad Pitt too. After winning the prize for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, he may well have considered himself worthy of a Best Actor in a Lead Role nod (and I am not suggesting that his role was a supporting one). Although his depiction of James – as a decaying has-been swinging between cool control and mania – would never have got close to touching Daniel Day-Lewis’s winning turn in TWBB, I do not think that Sweeney Todd was really a performance for which Johnny Depp needed a nomination.
Bloscars 