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The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Andrew Dominik. Cast: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, Paul Schneider

 

Description: Meticulously crafted portrait of one of 19th century America's most charismatic figures. While Jesse James and his brother Frank hold up trains to strike back at the Union that ruined their lives, 19-year-old social misfit Bob Ford slowly worms his way into the inner circle of the notorious James Gang. Bob's infatuation gradually festers into jealousy and hatred, and when lawmen put a bounty on Jesse's head, Bob agrees to pull the trigger. Aided by his brother Charley, Bob bides his time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

Country: US. 2007. 159mins

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How Jesse shot to hero status

 

In thoughtful mood: At the Venice Film Festival Brad Pitt won the Best Actor award for this role

Brooding: Pitt's acting abilities do not always match his screen persona

Reflective: The film has a slow-burning atmosphere rarely seen in a western

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Was the outlaw Jesse James, celebrated in a good many films already, hero or villain? Usually, movies make him a hero - "One of the doggonedest, dad-blamedest buckaroos that ever rode across the United States of America", as he was described in the influential 1939 movie by Henry King.

He was, however, a robber who didn't hesitate to kill and, towards the end of his comparatively short life when this film takes place, he was a tired and hunted man in his mid-thirties 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, the callow Robert Ford, shot him in the back when he was dusting off a picture at his seldom visited home. The day was Palm Sunday.

Brad Pitt, winner of the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival for his performance, plays James. It is not always easy, however, to equate the psychotic outlaw director Andrew Dominik suggests with this handsome star whose acting abilities do not always match the attractions of his screen persona. It is a performance that studiously avoids telling you very much about James and leaves the watcher to make up his or her own mind. Did he sense, when he invited Ford to his home before the murder, that his time was up? Did he want to be mythologised? The film doesn't tell you but poses both questions.

We know, however, that when James died, he become an instant hero and an enduring legend. And his murderer who, to make some money, re-enacted the killing on the stage received hate mail by the sackful, and was eventually shot by a stranger who regarded him, like so many, as a perfidious traitor.

All this is detailed in New Zealand director Dominik's 160-minute long and slow-paced film, based on a novel by Ron Hansen, which attempts a "poetic meditation" rather than much action.

That said, a very good sequence illustrating the Blue Cut train robbery does balance a strangely elegiac and thoughtful mood which may bore some but cause others to apply the overused word " masterpiece" to it.

Dominik, whose 2000 film Chopper is about another outlaw and killer eventually stabbed by the man he thought of as his best friend, has this time been a good deal more ambitious. So much so, in fact, that the film's release date has been held back for some time in an attempt by Hollywood's suits to apply some clarifying re-editing.

What remains now, and Dominik isn't telling us whether it is his preferred version, is beautifully shot by the veteran Roger Deakins in the wide open spaces of Canada, and has a slow-burning, reflective atmosphere rare in westerns.

It concentrates as much on Robert Ford as it does on James, portraying Ford as a young man desperate to join the gang but told by James's elder brother Frank (Sam Shepard): "You don't have the ingredients, son." James, however, was more tolerant, almost as if he vaguely sensed the possibility of a kind of Judas figure. "Do you want to be like me? Or do you want to be me?", he asks at one point.

Casey Affleck, younger brother of the better-known Ben, is Ford, and plays him as a quietly adoring hanger-on who in the end 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 James's behaviour meant that his own life was in danger.

His is the best performance in a film that's often impressive, sometimes dull but about as far from the other movie approximations of the story as it is possible to get. Someone has described it as "a dirty western with clean shirts" and you can see what they meant. For all its intended depth and psychological realism, which at its best carries reminders of the work of Terrence Malick, there's a fake myth-making quality to it that, because of its inordinate length, could be mistaken for grandeur.

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