Fame's assassin

Brad Pitt plays notorious outlaw Jesse James in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

When a film has a 10-word title like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, you know the director isn’t interested in short and sweet. The meandering narrative voiceover (drawn from the book by Ron Hansen) and the resulting 160-minute length will undoubtedly chafe some, but the breadth is something quietly wonderful. Taking his own sweet time, director Andrew Dominik moves slowly across the American west (Alberta and Manitoba, naturally), and with the same patience, drifts through the psyche of a baby assassin.

In the late 1800s, Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) is a 19-year-old, unbearably wide-eyed fan of outlaw legend Jesse James. With a box of Jesse James comics under his bed, and James’s exploits committed to memory, he is the Wild West equivalent of a front-row swooner at a rock concert. The parallel gains strength as Jesse is played by Brad Pitt, perhaps the only star in the world who might have a first-hand understanding of the mania James generated.

What’s amazing is that James achieved this global fame before the internet, before TV, and before the ritual public humiliations of the high-tech Britney age. He is an early American example of the deep human need to bond with one another over someone godly and unknowable, no matter how unholy he might be. But back then, no one really knew what Jesse James looked like, and one of the film’s lovely, small details is that James lived unnoticed as a wealthy businessman in Missouri. In his spare time, he played cards with local folk.

The Assassination of Jesse James opens in a grey, steamy woods on the morning when young Ford finally meets the James Gang. Squeaky and breathless, Ford pleads his case, begging to be included in the next train robbery. It’s as if his whole life has led up to this moment, and his neediness is revolting and foreboding; you know, right there, that this is going to end badly (well, maybe the title was your first hint).

Robert Ford (Casey Affleck, left) is a wide-eyed fan of Jesse James (Brad Pitt). (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Frank James (Sam Shepard) waves off Ford as an overeager child, but his brother Jesse is slightly more receptive. Ford has good timing; he’s cornered James when the man is at a private crossroads. He’s not quite Fat Elvis, but his biggest heists are behind him and he walks with a slight limp. He is a husband, a father, and only 34.

Standing in a large empty field, his broad back a target for anyone wanting to collect a huge bounty, James seems to know that his days are numbered. Pitt underplays the anti-hero nicely. His distant gaze is partly that of a sociopath — he only appears to enjoy the film’s sole train robbery when he smashes a man’s skull for nothing — and partly a man burdened, perhaps by his reputation, or his deeds. Pitt has his own genetic outsized beauty on his side; just looking at him inspires awe. “You want to be like me, or you want to be me?” James asks Ford. It’s the question one presumes all celebrities must ponder at some time or another.

If the film stopped there, and functioned only as a finger-shaking parable about fame, it would be a worthy, but ultimately small, project. Thankfully, it grows into something more interesting: this James is also a man betrayed, a Shakespearean figure who rides from house to house (the vast distance between people and things serves the air of isolation) trying to handle a posse of sycophants who scheme to betray him. The gang is hardly glamorous: Charley Ford (Sam Rockwell), Robert’s softer older brother; Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider), a lady-killer in direct response to his name; and the lonely buffoon, Ed Miller (Garrett Dellahunt).  Compared to this crew, Ford doesn’t look so silly, and James begins to trust the new kid, unable to recognize that his greatest threat is the man closest to him.

Affleck uses his marble-mouthed strangeness to forge a kind of disturbing egotism that seems at one with the greater, historical psyche of famous assassins, from John Wilkes Booth to Mark David Chapman: these guys believed themselves anointed, but no one else agreed. Feeling mocked and unappreciated by his brother and the other gang members, Ford sees an opportunity to make his mark another way by getting in bed with the sheriff.

The assassination is clumsy and ugly, one of the most shockingly un-western moments in a western. Ford’s life is irrevocably shaped by the incident he thought would make him a star: he has fatally misread his public. Mocked on stage and in song (in a bar, Nick Cave plays a troubadour taunting him with a tune about “the coward, Bob Ford”), his youthful quest for immortality has backfired, and his life as a private citizen is over.

Dominik borrows from Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah and Terrence Malick, but he has also made something very new in a genre well-trod upon. With its fuzzy edged lenses – much of the film looks kaleidoscopic – and moody music, The Assassination of Jesse James feels almost animated. Most impressively, Dominik sits back and lets the movie breathe, exhaling into all that empty land, the space where the myths of great men are built, and unravelled.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford opens in Toronto on Sept. 21 and Calgary on Oct. 5.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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