My friend Ross and I were having a drink the other night, sort of wishing we were Canadian. He’s back from doing a big-ass play in Toronto; we had both just seen “The Drowsy Chaperone,” and my favorite show in the world is “Slings and Arrows.” Having done a play in Toronto, Ross is four degrees of separation (the exchange rate, you know) from every other actor in or from Canada. They give grants to the arts; they make a lot of movies for not much money and let’s not talk about the health care. But we’re here. Cheers.

Then last night I went to a screening of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” in which the role of my home state of Missouri was played by Canada. Alberta, to be precise. I was okay with it until one scene where Brad Pitt and Sam Rockwell walk onto a frozen lake surrounded by the regal jagged-peaked, snow-covered Canadian Rockies. (No such heights exist in Missouri – this parenthetical aside was brought to you by my geologist brother.) The filmmaker did this, it seemed to me, just to show off the landscape. The scene could have just as well been played in the kitchen; in fact, it might have been more dramatic. Not even Jesse James can menace very well with such a backdrop.

So it’s a western and not in an accurate landscape and John Ford (ha! Any relation to Robert?) started this tradition. And it’s a shame that they couldn’t have shot it in Missouri which, while no Alberta, has a lush, bruised, spooky beauty all its own. And it would have been one thing if they’d just mumbled (and there’s plenty of mumbling), “Oh yeah, we’re in Missouri,” and never mentioned it again, but no, but they keep bringing it up. Kansas City. Independence. At one point the Coward Robert Ford mentions that his father was a preacher in Excelsior Springs. An ancestor of mine ran a newspaper in Excelsior Springs. I have been there and for you, Alberta, to play Excelsior Springs is the kind of reprehensible slumming you find in trust fund babies cadging cigarettes at dive bars.

Labels: "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford", being Canadian, Canada, Excelsior Springs, filming in Canada, Missouri

posted by Elizabeth at 9:42 PM