Movie Review - 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford'

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell and Sam Shepard
Directed by Andrew Dominik
Rated R

It's a rare thing to find a movie that creates so much beauty out of so much ugliness, but The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the best looking film of 2007, delivers one of the year's most passionate and haunting musical scores and mines unforgettable performances out of Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck.

Director Andrew Dominik has taken one of the most calloused tales of unrequited affection in American folklore and by not stripping it bare - but rather by painstakingly enriching the story with more cinematic elements - has found a lover's heartbeat the story never had before. Pitt plays Jesse James as a slowing, uncomfortable icon on the run. The first rock star in American history, by virtue that his misdeeds only served to make him more popular, James was less a bank robber by the late 1870s than he was a celebrity. If outlaws are revered, it started with Jesse James.

And even though Jesse keeps his walls up by the time young Robert Ford (Affleck) gains enough trust among the James Gang to enter its inner circle, there is still something unspoken about him that draws Ford closer to him. As a boy, Ford daydreamed of being like the Robin Hood of the 19th Century. "He was always, 'Jesse this' and 'Jesse that,'" laughs his older brother (Sam Rockwell). But as another outlaw icon, Bob Dylan, once sang, "What looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big," and though Robert Ford still clearly loves Jesse James, loving him at any cost proves too high a price for both men.

Dominik has enlisted a top notch ensemble of actors to bring adequate depth to the roughhewn Old West. The same actors could probably remake Glengarry Glen Ross or All the President's Men (and indeed, a couple of them have helped remake Ocean's 11), but they aren't what you would call "Western" actors. They don't ever give you the feeling that you're watching Tommy Lee Jones or Robert Duvall, and it works because this story isn't at all about what Duvall's Lonesome Dove is about. These actors work perfectly for the flowery tragedy Dominik is telling.

The photography by Oscar winner Roger Deakins is instantly and consistently perfect. The score, co-authored by Nick Cave (whose screenplay for The Proposition also helped stand the Western on its ear) might be the most fitting, working with the actors and the filmmakers, never overstepping its authority nor fading too far into Jesse James' long shadow.

The Assassination of Jesse James is not The Outlaw Josey Wales or The Magnificent Seven or even The Wild Bunch. Then again, none of those classics are The Assassination of Jesse James, either.