We may know how it ends, but perhaps the biggest achievement of the piece is the manner in which director Dominik makes us forget how it does with a stunning study.

Rating: 7/10 (16 July 2009)

There is an underlying and quite eerie sense of substance in Andrew Dominik's 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the kind that is linked to the fact it is a study of an individual's obsession with a celebrity; a lust to be like a certain other, no matter how infamous or hated they may be. Here is a film with a central idea; a central study that is executed wonderfully well, with a slow burning and alluring approach which compliments the slow and steady delving into obsession. Simply put, it's great to look at; wonderful to watch and by the end, rather frightening.
The film, whose central study is got across in one brilliant scene, looks at what is an unhealthy fondness of someone who has got to a relative pinnacle of a career by way of murder; robbery and bullying. In what might be the film's best scene, we encounter the outlaw Jesse James (Pitt) in a bath tub – at his most raw, at his most vulnerable and at his most revealing. At the entrance to the bathroom stands the proclaimed 'coward', Robert Ford (Affleck), and they exchange words before James poses him the question around which the study revolves: "Do you want to be like me, or actually BE me?" Here is an exchange in which James, in his rawest of forms, challenges Ford's ideologies to do with an unnatural fondness and makes us aware, that he himself is aware, that he might carry a certain aura about him.
The film documents James from 1881 to 1882, while incorporating any feats, robberies and murders that unfolded at that time on a twin parallel with Ford's gradual coming to terms with the fact this idolisation exists within him. The entire piece is narrated by a certain Hugh Ross, adding an interesting ingredient on top of an already interesting study. The inclusion of a narrator initially felt, at least to me, unwarranted or perhaps un-needed. Whatever tale or recalling of events that needed to play out didn't necessarily strike me as the sort that required narration from an agent uninvolved. But I think the inclusion is merited when you link it to the overall picture; that fact the film might be seen as a lecture, or a warning of sorts, of this sort of intrigue and obsession with violence in the media and aspiration to become someone, or someone of similar ilk, whom isn't a particularly good role model.
But that's not to say the film talks down to us. It very cleverly distances us from unfolding the film from either of one of the two lead's points of view. We see this from a third person perspective; someone not directly involved in the text which feeds off two people, one of which is a hardened and rather nasty outlaw while the other is a young man whom comes complete with stalker-like tendencies and an unnatural fondness for a national villain. During one scene set around a dinner table in Ford's home, James sits amidst the rest of the family as tensions flair. But the film additionally seems to like the notion that Jesse James might act as an alter-ego to the rest of Ford's family, as well as the American Dream in general. He sits there, almost as some sort of a visualisation of an amoral manner in which to garner attention, money, fame and, ultimately, admirers. This, twinned with whatever conflict going on between James and Ford, adds a certain extra layer of antagonism between James and the Fords.
As the film nears its conclusion and the inevitable nears, certain flashbacks see Jesse refer to himself in the third person sense as some kind of overwhelming anxiety and an aspect of suicidal ideation begins to overcome him. We are given his point of view, a rarity up to this point as the film provides us with a blurred and wide angled lens as he stares out of a window giving off a very uncanny sense of dread and a delicate mindset coming close to crumbling down. The film finishes what it starts in a true and engaging manner. The epilogue and Ford's supposedly newfound celebrity status following the shooting of James brings him nothing but misery, and he never, ever – as the voice over states, comes anywhere near replicating the aura nor fame James had when he was at his peak of 'celebrity' status. What was an unhealthy obsession, quickly turned into a realisation and then into an unhealthy groove of trivialisation and guilt. Ford gave himself the big build up, latched onto the wrong beliefs and paid for it, and this film is an impressive documentation of that process.