The old west was a complicated time

Rating: 9/10 (18 March 2008)

I am willing to bet that the end of the movie is given away in the title in large part because the relationship between Jesse James and the coward Robert Ford is so complex, and James himself so unpredictable, that there is still tension on the way to an ending that we know is coming. Then again, it's also true that not only is the assassination not the end of the movie, and the tension created by violence that we can see coming is, in most ways, more real and more satisfying than even realistic violence, such as can be scene in one particular scene in the recent Collateral when (note a possible spoiler here for that movie) when Mark Ruffalo's character Fanny is so unexpectedly shot.
The first thing that struck me about this film was that it is much more stylized than the westerns that I have seen. It's difficult to make wide expanses of empty frontier look anything less than beautiful in an almost mythic way, but the time lapse photography and occasional textured shots of a brooding Jesse James (sort of like a film version of the movie's cover) give the film an almost futuristic feel, which is an odd but pleasing sensation to have in a movie that takes place in the late 1800s.
We meet the infamous James gang as they are planning to get out of the criminal world at the height of their game. It strikes me as a time when the mostly agrarian American society was so in need of a hero that they, in many ways, accepted a man who was famous for robbing the very people that deified him. He did seem to have some of the characteristics of Robin Hood, but not many. Mostly, we can identify with him because he is clearly a good father who loves his kids, and for some reason even a brutal killer can gain sympathy from modern audiences for being good to his kids. He is also shown as a loving husband, but one can only speculate on how far his loyalty to his wife goes when he is away from his family for so long.
Enter Robert Ford, played with striking effectiveness by Casey Affleck, who has appeared in an impressive list of films in his relatively short career, and now is credited above Brad Pitt. Not a bad career move! He has a fascinating story, not the least part of which is that his wife is the sister of the legendary River Phoenix and the also legendary Joaquin Phoenix. Casey has never been much of a leading man, and it is exactly that fact that makes him a perfect Robert Ford.
Some have suggested a homo-erotic lust towards James from Ford, and while I wouldn't go so far as to call it lust, his hero-worship of James certainly permeates his life completely, and the assassination strikes me not as the most intimate that Ford can be with Jesse without sex, but rather, as a sort of If I can't have you, no one will. Although still, I don't see anything sexual at all in their relationship, but rather a lashing out of Ford, who so desperately wants to be accepted by Jesse that, after consistently failing, he resorts to killing him, the less painful of his two remaining options (the other being acceptance of his inherent inferiority and subsequent expulsion from the gang or permanent subservience).
The other way that the story presents a surprising level of complexity is after the assassination, where Ford receives the fame that he always wanted and, for some expected and some unexpected reasons, becomes truly miserable. It is a strange exploration of the media's and the public's glorification of violence, as a man who terrorized the public is seen as a fallen icon and the man who killed him is branded a murderer.
It seems that Ford's mistake is in so publicly glorifying himself, reenacting the killing in front of live audiences, eventually being heckled by the crowds for being a coward. The problem that he doesn't realize is that the public doesn't understand the relationship between James and Ford, which was always uncomfortable, even as Ford tried so hard to sidle up to James and be accepted as his "sidekick." When the assassination happens, James knows it, and so does Ford and so do we. The audiences watching the reenactment only saw Ford shoot James from behind, not really knowing that James knew it was going to happen and allowed it. Maybe even welcomed it.
At just under 3 hours the movie is a bit long, but it is also a modern western epic, and there aren't very many of those. This movie will invariably be compared to other recent westerns, such as the astonishingly good 3:10 to Yuma, one of the best and most redeeming westerns I've seen in years. Like that movie, this one also has a spectacular cast who inhabit their roles and give us a look at the old west in a way that I didn't know was possible anymore. It seems that the western genre is coming back to life