The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a mesmerizing meditation on an American myth. Filmed with an eye for the haunting beauty of shadow and sparse, lush light, Jesse James radiates off the screen with a gorgeous visual glow that serves its story as much as it stands alone as its own worthy attraction. The sight of the film alone devastates, but when paired with the timeless tale of renegade cowboy and complex criminal mind Jesse James, it becomes one of the most visually and intellectually luminous American films of this or any year.

Here James (a brilliantly restrained Brad Pitt) is captured with a strange mix of cunning, cruelty, and devout kindness. He’s a decent minded family man who happens to rob banks and trains. He kills people. He doesn’t mind the deed. But there’s something eerily hateless to his idea of murder. It’s a fact of his life. It is not the extraordinary act other people see it to be. And in this way, simply through the distortion of his perception in comparison to most of society, the film reveals James to be the kind of monster that doesn’t necessarily evoke our immediate condemnation. He’s brilliantly fascinating, perhaps depressed for reasons even he doesn’t understand, and most of all, he actually seems to want to like and trust the people around him. He’s been through more than a few gang members in his time, and yet the film seems to suggest that he probably liked them all. He liked them even up until the moment he shot them dead out of necessity to his operation. What’s brilliant here, more so than any of the fabulous scenery or fun western plot points, is the sheer potency of the film’s look at the enigmatic James. It fills in blanks, makes some suggestions, and provides detail enough to nudge us in the right direction. What it doesn’t do is spell out his nature for us, crudely deducing by its own standards who he was and how he felt. We get the broad stroke portrait through narration and the like, but the details are laid on blank canvas, waiting for us to put together the pieces. The film is more squarely set in the mindset of Robert Ford (a soulful Casey Affleck at his fidgety best), the eventual assassin of the strangely beloved Wild West cowboy whose life was full of far less mystery and which, in turn, extracted no passionate interest from his peers as that of James did. We see James mostly as Ford sees him, a man looming in shadows and sitting by himself on back porches. He’s nice at times and terrifying at times. Sometimes he even cries, though we’re not sure why. For all the humanity the film brings to the story of James, the heavy historical background and the true to date sets and costumes, it cannot help but let him escape the film as more than a question mark than ever before. No matter how much information is known about him, no one can seem to pin down exactly who he was and the film justifiably concedes that it can bring us no closer to the answers we seek.

Grade: A