Hammertime: Casey Affleck sets his sights on an American icon as Robert Ford.

Perfectly Lawless

Andrew Dominik revisits a legend with a melancholy modern eye.

by Sean Burns

An unnamed narrator (Hugh Ross) dispassionately lays out a dryly academic collection of facts, which instantly and quite pleasingly clangs against Roger Deakins’ breathtaking, baroquely stylized cinematography. (A lot of frames boast fuzzy distorted margins, as if shot through a pinhole camera.) We begin after the glory days are already long over, with big brother Frank James (Sam Shepard) sneering in disapproval at the motley crew of redneck peckerwoods Jesse assembles for their final train robbery. By morning Frank will have retired and headed east, leaving his puzzling younger sibling to fend for himself.

But Brad Pitt’s Jesse James doesn’t handle repose particularly well. Uprooting his family to skitter all over Missouri under the pseudonym “Thomas Howard,” he’s restless and fretful—a man dwarfed by his own outsized reputation. Jesse can’t seem to help dropping in on that last gang of sycophantic lackeys time and again, basking in their hero worship and deliberately scaring the crap out of them by handling snakes or pulling pistols, eating up the adulation and then hating them all for loving him so much. (Casting a contemporary tabloid superstar as America’s first self-loathing celebrity is one of Dominik’s best, sickest jokes, and some of the satire plays out like an episode of Entourage, circa 1882.)

Then there’s Bob Ford, portrayed by Casey Affleck in a performance so creepy and beady-eyed, it’s an icky revelation. Bob still keeps his Jesse James dime-novels and assorted crap memorabilia stashed under his bed, like a schoolgirl with a pop-star crush. He’s grown up idolizing the legendary gunslinger and desperately pines for sidekick status. But when Bob’s genuine affections become fodder for Jesse’s cheap giggles, all that adoration curdles into something more sinister—sort of like Mark David Chapman 100 years ahead of schedule.

Twitchy, unnerving and slowly eaten away by paranoia, Pitt has never been better. He’s the life of the party until the moment he slits your throat, and there’s something shattered and empty lurking behind the actor’s eyes. (When that dirty little coward finally shoots Mr. Howard, it almost feels like a mercy killing.)

Anyone who’s seen Chopper knows Dominik has a seriously ghoulish sense of humor, and thus even a movie as mournful as Jesse winds up rife with bizarre and hilarious digressions, including a scene-stealing turn from All the Real Girls star and co-writer Paul Schneider as the gang’s turncoat lothario, as well as a killer cameo from none other than James Carville as Missouri governor Thomas T. Crittenden.

But the film’s predominant aura is one of melancholy inevitability, the overbearing sense of an American mythology already looming so large it’s simply beyond the control of these sad little men stuck taking part in it. The Assassination of Jesse James has the same doom-laden DNA as those great druggy, fatalistic 1970s anti-Westerns like Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. Deakins’ photography is at times distractingly beautiful, which feels about right, as he and Dominik often position these actors in the distance, always on the verge of being swallowed up by the grandiose settings in which they’ve somehow found themselves.

The cumulative effect is like watching history slowly crystallize in amber, with little regard for the poor schmucks trapped inside. It’s strange to say this about a movie that most will already consider way too long, but my one complaint is that I wish Dominik had lingered longer on the riveting, bilious epilogue that follows Ford to the very end of his days.

The film’s last moments physically collapse in upon themselves, breaking down into a procession of still frames, time itself finally freezing on Affleck’s chillingly befuddled, hollowed-out gaze.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
A
Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck
Opens Fri., Oct. 5