Pitt the Major Flaw in This Otherwise Strange and Beautiful Western

Rating: 8/10 (10 October 2007)

2007 is shaping up to be the year of the Western revival.
There's not much need of a plot summary for "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," because it's all right there in the title. And there's not much plot to summarize anyway. This is a movie more interested in character than plot and more interested really in aesthetics than character, and it's a strangely fascinating film. It's certainly one of the most beautiful films I've seen in a long time.
The young actor Casey Affleck is a revelation as James's assassin. His Robert Ford is awkward and stammering, whose appearance and behavior leads people to believe he's dumber than he is. His idolatry of Jesse James is fueled by the dime novels he collects and in which James so frequently appears. The character as written is somewhat obtuse; I'm not sure I completely ever understood what makes Ford turn on James, or when the change in his feeling occurs. But Affleck does wonders with what he's given to work with and gives one of the best performances I've seen thus far in the year. Unfortunately, at the film's center is Brad Pitt, and he creates a vacuum which the film succeeds in spite of rather than being dragged down by. Pitt is simply not a good actor, but his good looks and sheen of Hollywood glamour will assure that film makers keep giving him starring roles. I kept thinking about Russell Crowe's marvelous performance as an outlaw in "3:10 to Yuma" and couldn't help but wonder how much better this film would have been if Crowe had been cast instead. Pitt doesn't sink the film, because the cast he's surrounded by does such good work (in addition to Affleck, Sam Rockwell is a stand out as Robert Ford's older brother), but he prevents it from being even better than it otherwise could be.
Some may be turned off by the film's formality; virtually every shot looks like a carefully composed photograph. But I thought the film's tone and visual style matched the subject. After all, we're talking about a legendary figure here, someone who's as much myth as man, so why not give the movie the imprint of myth as well? "Jesse James" isn't much interested in ideas, though I think it wants to be. Only in the movie's final moments, after Ford has assassinated James and then suffers the harassment of a public that decides to idolize James in his death and deride Ford as a coward, does the film toy with the question of what distinguishes a hero from a villain. It doesn't come to any conclusions, and because of Pitt's inadequate performance, it never explains why James was able to make himself into a legend while Ford died a figure of infamy. But I was willing to let the film's sheer physical beauty and fine supporting cast sweep me along with them and cause me to not care too much about anything else.
Grade: A-