The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

Popular history is intent on making Jesse James a folk hero, the Robin Hood figure of the American West who had lots of fun adventures and stole from stodgy rich people. In reality, he was a cold-blooded murderer, a racist, and a strong supporter of the Confederacy, and on April 3rd, 1882, he was killed by a man named Bob Ford.

I bet you guessed that last part from the title. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford lies somewhere in the hazy middle of the James myth; it acknowledges his ruthlessness and doesn't hide his love of the Confederacy, but is nonetheless sympathetic toward him (again, as evidenced by the title itself). He's written not as an evil man but a lost soul who was in many ways on the brink of losing his mind.

The movie is two hours and forty minutes long, so with previews expect to be in the theater a solid three hours. That's a mighty long time for a Western without much action and an ending that is about as predetermined as it gets, but The Assassination is in many ways a fascinating journey, a methodical, step-by-step retelling of the events that lead up to James's murder.

For some reason, maybe thanks to the trailers, I had a vision that the movie wouldn't be much more than Robert Ford and Jesse James sitting around a house having a series of conversations until Ford decides to shoot him. The film is much more interesting than that. It begins with a train robbery - the only holdup in the film - as Jesse (Brad Pitt in black hair and a brown beard) and his brother Frank (Sam Shepard) lead a relatively unexperienced crew, including their cousin Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner), Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) and his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider), and Ed Miller (Garret Dillahunt).

The train job was on September 7th, 1881, and the gang mostly disbands afterwards as we follow each of the above men, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs, sometimes together. The long middle section of the film is generally a series of trips to meet one another, sometimes innocently, and sometimes for darker reasons. I of course won't reveal all of the cause-and-effect as it's the heart of the film, but it holds our interest first as a fascinating historical story and character study, second because the gunplay that does happen is all the more startling because there's not much of it, and third because of the sheer filmmaking talent involved.

The film looks spectacular thanks to Roger Deakins's cinematography; a veteran of dozens of films including most of the Coen brothers' work, his work here is beautiful in capturing the loneliness of the environment, and is perfectly complimented by the score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The film is also periodically narrated by ...