Andrew Dominik

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

“You ever count the stars?” Jesse James, played here by Brad Pitt, poses this question to a slow-witted member of his outlaw gang before admitting that he has tried but never comes up with the same number twice. The stars are always changing.

Such an introspective exchange would have no place in a typical Hollywood Western, but in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it sums up the very existence of the titular character. By existence, I don’t mean how he lived in the West, but how he lives on today through legend and folklore. Director and screenwriter Andrew Dominik has presented us with a cinematic poem that introduces us to Jesse James for all that he was: man, myth, and legend. The fact is you can’t assign a fixed number to the infinite any more than you can pin down exactly who Jesse James was. The stories are always changing.

The narration itself is unreliable, at turns contradicting onscreen images and then reinforcing what we already know. Ambiguities aside, the film is laden with enough rich detail to validate the film’s 160 minute running time. Instead of focusing on the James Gang’s bloody and lucrative years of famous robberies, Dominik trains his eye on James’s fall from public grace and descent into paranoid hibernation.

It’s easy to get caught up in the star-power of Brad Pitt and his deft portrayal of James as a broken, haunted man. Lurking in the shadows of Jesse James’s falling star, however, is what truly cements the film as a modern classic: the multi-layered performance of Casey Affleck as the runt (or “coward,” as it were) Robert Ford, a man forever relegated to the sidelines. Subversively powerful in the role, Affleck imbues Ford with enough insecure ambition to evoke immediate empathy from the audience. We may identify with Ford but we never really trust him, a result of either the information laid out in the title, or Affleck’s shifty performance. Jesse’s older brother, Frank (played by Sam Shepard) speaks for the audience when he bluntly tells Ford, “I don’t know what it is about you, but the more you talk, the more you give me the willies.”

Ford’s tragedy lies in his insatiable ambition which, as a child obsessed with Jesse James, drove him to eventually become a member of the outlaw gang. The closer he got to James, the more he actually wanted to be the man. Of course, finding this impossible, he reverts to the next step: outsmarting the man and proving himself the superior. In effect, Assassination plays out as a Greek tragedy set on the high plains of America’s yesteryear.

If this movie passed you by in the theaters, be sure to rent the DVD and watch it on the biggest screen at your disposal. Roger Deakins, the film’s cinematographer, has offered us a truly breathtaking view. This year is something of a high water mark for Deakins, who received an Oscar nomination for Assassination as well as for No Country for Old Men. Working with a muted palette, he paints a world as wild, wide, lean, and lonesome as the Wintry West itself. Much of the film’s beauty lies in its sprawling, elegiac panorama of an 1881 America, which for all its staggering immensity, still seems claustrophobic and oppressive to the characters. This is a film of tone, matched in its commanding visuals by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s subtly haunting score which enhances but never distracts from the experience of the film.

With just two features under his belt, New Zealand-born Andrew Dominik is shaping up to be one of the next great filmmakers. In his auspicious directorial debut, Chopper, Dominik showed he had a great eye for latent talent when he cast then-comedian Eric Bana as the brutal lead, effectively launching his acting career. In Assassination, Dominik rolled the dice on Casey Affleck, who earned an Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actor. In both films, Dominik has created unique and grisly visions, told with both the brash experimentation of an emerging artist and the assured confidence of an established filmmaker. If he continues crafting deeply personal and rewarding films such as these, we’ll be following his career for years to come.

Jesse James is a man who has lived and died innumerable times, through the retellings and reenactments of his actual earth-bound existence. At one point in the film, James tells a story about himself in the third person. It would seem that even Jesse James can’t resist the urge to tell his tale and propagate the myth.

We are left to make up our own minds about Jesse James, Robert Ford, and what truly defines a coward. In one corner we have Jesse James, legendary criminal and beloved family-man, who viciously beats a child, shoots members of his own gang in the back, and kills a defenseless man in cold blood. In the other corner we have Robert Ford, the social pariah who stood toe-to-toe with a towering legend of the West and emerged the victor, the man forever branded as “Coward” for assassinating his mentor, oppressor, and would-be killer. To which of these men does the label of “Coward” truly apply? There’s no answer, or at least none that matters.

We each have our own number affixed to the stars above. Mine doesn’t make yours wrong. It’s our instinct to remember history as we see it; from the only angle we are afforded. It’s our duty to tell it anyway. To quote The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a seminal Western from 1962: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

By Neal Tyler

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