James Hynes

My favorite movie this year was New Zealand writer and director Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which puts me, I know, pretty far out on the fringes of awards handicappers. It's won a few awards—Brad Pitt got a best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival—but as a going concern, the movie seems to have sunk without a trace. It didn't even play in very many places, and the only reason I can think of that it played at my local multiplex in South Austin for nearly a month is that distributors must think we'll watch anything with horses and guns in it down here. Not that I'm complaining, because, a) that's sort of true, and b) like I say, I loved it. It went straight to the top of my list of favorite westerns, right up there with My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. (Don't get me started on Westerns.) Everything the critics hated about it—the pace, the unusual cinematography, the literary narration—I just flat-out loved. I read Ron Hansen's novel years ago, as well as his novel about the Dalton Brothers, Desperadoes, and together the two books are, along with True Grit, Little Big Man, and Max Crawford's Lords of the Plain, the best literary westerns I've ever read. The movie stands spectacularly well on its own, though, an art house Western full of melancholy, with some of the best performances I've ever seen in a Western, especially Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt.

But I mention it only by way of coming to Dominik's first film (he's only made two so far), a wild, funny, and terrifying true life crime drama called Chopper. Based on the bestselling memoir of a real Australian criminal named Mark Brandon Read, the movie's remarkable for lots of reasons—it's lively, smart, unpredictable, and inventive—but I want to mention two reasons in particular.

One is that it shows that Dominik's portrayal of Jesse James as a charismatic psychopath has its roots in the earlier film. Both films, in different ways, examine the effect of a charming but unpredictably violent criminal on the lives of those around him. The focus in Jesse James is divided a little more evenly, since James's murderer, Robert Ford, is the point of view character and gets equal time with the man he killed. In Chopper, the point of view character is Chopper himself, though the film is carefully engineered not to take sides.

But, having seen Jesse James first, I already knew that Dominik is an astonishingly gifted filmmaker. The real revelation for me was Eric Bana, whom I'd only known from his stalwart, humorless, and tormented roles as the main Israeli agent in Speilberg's Munich, as Hector in Troy, and as Bruce Banner in Hulk. Not that he's bad in these films—he's especially moving as Hector—but he doesn't show a lot of range. I'd pegged him as good-looking and soulful, and not much more. But in Chopper, he's amazing—loud, boisterous, violent, alternately charming and bullying, not to mention self-pitying and paranoid, the sort of guy who demands all the attention in the room, whether anybody likes it or not. As portrayed by Bana and written by Dominik, Chopper is a complex and conflicted character, and as kinetic as Bana is in the part, he's just as convincing playing Chopper's guilt after he's hurt somebody—in one scene, only moments after he's stabbed a guy—as he is playing the man's menace. It's a brilliant, memorable, thrilling performance.

In fact, I could scarcely believe I was watching the same actor who glowered his way through Hulk. In Chopper he's less like his performances in other films than he is like the young De Niro in Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, cocky and crazy and kinda sexy all at once. The comparison is reinforced by the fact that he put on 30 pounds to play the part, so he doesn't even look like the lean warrior he plays in other films, but like the real, beefy thug Mark Read was in real life. (The DVD features interviews with the real Read, who's nearly as scary in middle-age as Bana plays him as a younger man.)

Bana is also, in between shootings, beatings, and icepick stabbings, really funny throughout the film. Wondering where this Eric Bana came from and why I'd never seen him before, I checked out his IMDb entry and found out that before he became a straight actor, he'd done stand-up in Australia for ten years, specializing in celebrity impressions, and starring for a time in his own TV sketch comedy show. Here I'd thought he was another Aussie smoulderer like Russell Crowe or Guy Pearce, and it turns out he was more like Carol Burnett. Perhaps a better comparision might be Alec Guinness, who also got his start playing comedies and worked his way up into more serious roles, but whose stock-in-trade throughout his career was his ability to vanish into a part and play convincingly all sorts of of men (and even at least one woman, in Kind Hearts and Coronets). The antic inventor of The Man in the White Suit is scarcely recognizable in Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia, but it's the same man playing both parts.

At any rate, go rent Chopper and go see Jesse James (if you can find it)—the latter is genuinely glorious on the big screen, and Andrew Dominik is a terrifically exciting and ambitious filmmaker. And I can only hope that some studio or producer turns Eric Bana loose again and gives him a comedy or a really juicy character role. He's impressive enough as a leading man, but the man's a gifted comedian, a world-class mimic, and a truly great character actor, and he's capable of a lot more than just showing off his abs (which are, to be fair, pretty impressive).

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On a completely unrelated note, you can read Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize lecture here. She became my favorite Nobel Prize winner ever (not like I'm keeping score) because of her endearingly cranky reaction when a British TV journalist told her she'd won as she was carrying her groceries out of a cab. "Oh, Christ," she said, as if the reporter had just announced that he was from the Jehovah's Witnesses. Her Nobel speech is written in the same prickly mood, which only serves to sharpen her undiminished idealism. It's not particularly eloquent, it's a little too long and repetitive—like her books, in fact—but it's more memorable than a lot of more carefully crafted speeches.

 

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