Venice Film Festival

It is doubtful whether the outlaw Jessie James was as handsome as Brad Pitt, though the actor acquits himself well enough in the part, even if a spot of ageing make-up might have made him look less like the Hollywood star we all admire and more like the character he is portraying.

Towards the end of his life when this film takes place, James was a tired and hunted man with two painful bullet holes in his body, something wrong with his kidneys and subject to manic depression.

He trusted no one and often went into pathological and probably psychotic rages for no apparent reason.

He was right to be suspicious even of his few friends, since one of them, Robert Ford, shot him in the back when he was dusting off a picture at his rarely visited home.

Yet when he died, he became an instant hero and an enduring legend. And the man who killed him received hate mail by the sackful, and was eventually shot by a stranger who regarded him, like so many who forgot that James was a killer, as a perfidious traitor.

All this is in Australian Andrew Dominic's 155-minute long and slow-paced film which attempts a "poetic meditation" rather than much action, though there is a very good train robbery sequence to balance the thoughtful mood.

Dominic, who made Chopper, about another outlaw and killer, has this time been a good deal more ambitious. His film is often beautifully shot by Roger Deakins, and has a slow burning atmosphere rare in westerns.

But you need some patience to sit through it, particularly since its actors are prone to mumble their lines in what are probably the correct Missouri accents but are often difficult to understand.

Casey Affleck, the younger brother of Ben, is Ford, a young hanger-on who was ambitious to carve his own niche in history and thought killing James was the best way to do it. He also genuinely feared that the way James was behaving meant that his own life was in danger.

His is the best performance in a film that's frequently impressive, sometimes dull but about as far from the other movie approximations of the story as it is possible to get.