The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

I'm always up for a Western, and was keen to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (I just read that in Brad Pitt's contract he insisted that the title not be shortened). It never did get to my neck of the woods, and I just caught up with it on DVD.

Written and directed by Andrew Dominik, and based on a novel by Ron Hansen, one can see why it perhaps didn't get the kind of broad release that a film starring Brad Pitt would normally get. The film is dark and meditative, and extremely literary, with large chunks of narration that I assume come straight from the novel. This makes for a very atmospheric film, but not one slavishly holds to the conventions of the Western.

That being said, I enjoyed it a great deal. The general theme is notoriety and its perils. Jesse James, who was in reality pretty much a ne'er-do-well and vicious thief, was romanticized into a folk hero during his lifetime by a press that was sympathetic to the Confederate cause. James, as a teenager, rode with the even viler William Quantrill and his raiders, and then became a bank robber. Stories about his giving away his ill-gotten gains were embellished, to say the least. But in post-war Missouri, a hero was what seemed to be needed, and James fit the bill.

As such, he had acolytes, among them the Ford brothers, Charley and Bob. In the film, Bob is presented as a starry-eyed dreamer, who has read dime novels about Jesse since boyhood, and now wants nothing more than to join his gang and prove his courage. The James gang, especially after a disastrous bank robbery attempt in Northfield, Minnesota, is decimated, and James has few men he can trust, especially when his brother Frank calls it quits and moves east.

So the Ford brothers become James' confidantes, but as Bob gets to know Jesse the more disenchanted he becomes. As I watched scenes of Casey Affleck, who is outstanding as Bob, come to the realization that his hero is less than he thought he was, I thought of the Mark Chapman/John Lennon situation, where someone who worships another from afar comes to insane realization that he must destroy that which he worships. Bob starts to work with the authorities and on an April day in 1882 shoots Jesse in the back of the head while he is dusting a picture on the wall.

The film is leisurely paced. Watching it on DVD allowed to me to take a few breaks, although the sensational photography by Roger Deakins, which is seeped in sepia, surely must have looked finer on the big screen. Affleck steals the show, but Pitt is also very good as the increasingly paranoid James, as is Sam Rockwell as Charley. Of all the films that have been about Jesse James, this is probably the best and most definitive, and should be the last for quite a while.