Heroism Is In the Eye of the Beholder

Rating: 10/10 (15 August 2008)

How sad and painful the story of Robert Ford is and how grimly telling it is of the shallow and insensitive nature of people as a mass. It is a western, yet it's a very patient and ominous western that plays out more like a Terence Malick film than a John Ford or Sam Peckinpah one. Westerns, by the very nature of the backdrop they set for their stories, portray primitive and unwittingly obsolete ways of life confronted modern technological or social changes. This may be depicted by showing conflict between natives and settlers, or by showing ranchers being threatened by the Industrial Revolution. American Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s emphasize honor and sacrifice. Westerns from the 1960s and 1970s have a more negative examination, lionizing a disloyal anti-hero and bringing to light the cynicism, viciousness and discrimination of the American West. The earlier westerns skim the glorious surface of the time and the later ones dig deep into the brutal nature of people in the era, but neither approach is bad. However the typical American-made western uses these elements to tell a simple morality tale that leaves room for barfights, shootouts and the salvage of helpless, entirely dependent damsels in distress. The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford exceeds this by combining the two views and creating a dark, cruel portrait of a dark, cruel time. When the movie ended, I sat staring at the screen, my thoughts entirely arrested by what I had just watched.
The only aggravation of which I can think is the film's narration, which gives away subtext right as we would be absorbing it just as clearly without the narration. Sometimes the narrator is needed, sometimes it appears that the narrator baby-steps us through a scene that might be too hard for our little brains to comprehend. I still dismiss it with the wave of my hands, however, because it is there more for the purpose of setting old storyteller sort of feel of the time, and storytelling is the axis of the lives of both Jesse James and Robert Ford, and how they came to meet.
Brad Pitt's portrayal of Jesse James is greatest performance, bar none. He is so chilling, not only because he can alternately appear so convincingly vulnerable and lethally menacing uninterrupted from one moment to the next, but also because he gives you the distinct worrying impression that he could truly live a life completely alone, leaving a thorough variable for the outcomes of anyone in his presence. There are many scenes with James where the most telling things he does are very difficult to script and were likely moments where the actor is given to impulse and improvisation. These happen to be some of his best scenes because Pitt renders him with a very clear and acute understanding of his careful, private, manipulative, sensitive personality. In a moment when someone lies to him, well or not well, Jesse doesn't make a very telling face. Pitt simply wears a blank, expectant expression that opens up a gash in the scene where we feel just as certainly as he does that what's just been said doesn't fit. He radiates a subsequent awkwardness to all around him, including the audience, and he somehow seems untouched by it, the only person still appearing comfortable in the room.
There is an almost frighteningly natural chemistry between Casey Affleck, who plays the weak yet eager and ambitious Robert Ford, and his idol, Jesse James. His submissive yet obsessive character, hungry for attention and admiration, and James's calmly dominant and sadistic ambiguity towards him is epitomal of real, searing, almost borderline sexual connection between two people who were almost bound by fate to meet and affect each other.
Sam Rockwell, one of the most lovable, natural and underused actors working right now, is always a delight to see, his trademark happy-go-lucky imperviousness creating great spark as Robert Ford's older brother Charley, who laughs along with Robert's tormentors but very slowly reveals a more concerned side when his dense mind begins to realize that it's not all fun and games.
Andrew Dominik is an auspiciously promising new filmmaker whose successive efforts will hopefully equal this beautifully shot, giftedly atmospheric, all too real masterpiece, but it's difficult to fathom whether or not they could exceed it.