A country for young men

Rating: 9/10 (12 April 2010)

With this, No Country For Old Men, and There Will Be Blood, we've recently been given a formidable apocalyptic Western triumvirate - you wait fifteen years (Unforgiven was released in 1992) and suddenly three bleak classics come along at once! Watching Andrew "Chopper" Dominik's second feature, you'll quickly realise it has as much to say about modern Western society as it has about its 1880s setting. Here are people - REAL people - who are so obsessed by the elusive nature of celebrity that they risk forgetting who they are. When James says to Ford, "Can't figure it out: do you want to be like me or do you want to BE me?", it could be that he is really asking, "Who am I?". James has spent his life building his own myth; perhaps the reason he wishes to keep Ford so close is because no one knows more about Jesse James than his biggest fan. By the end of it all, Ford's actions serve only to enhance the celebrity of James; heck, Ford needn't have existed at all - after all, the suggestion here is that James effectively killed himself.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' score at once twinkles like a fairy tale, but gradually descends through a kind of dark, apocalyptic malaise, and finally into tragedy, as James' steely facade is stripped away to reveal the depressive underneath. It's a new world for Pitt - a different kind of manic, miles away from his twitchy turn in Twelve Monkeys. His puppy dog eyes capture the madness and the sadness perfectly. He is upstaged, though, by Casey Affleck as the coward himself, and also by Roger Deakins' camera, which prowls the plains like a lonesome wolf.
The pacing is slow. But slow never meant the same thing as boring - just ask Terrence Malick, or Stanley Kubrick, or Michael Cimino. Sometimes, they really DO make them like they used to.