European Films

New Zealand-born Australian director Andrew Dominik announces his arrival as an excellent stylist and expert storyteller with the mouthful that is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel about the most famous outlaw in US history is not a very bloody or even just a violent affair, but it is never less than captivating film that envelops the viewer for 155 minutes in a version of 1880s USA that recalls the serials and novels from the same era (as well as westerns made in the time when more than two a year came out). Brad Pitt impresses as James, but the film belongs to Casey Affleck, whose brave performance as the titular coward is utterly compelling to the very last minute.

 

Like another project that lingered in post-production for a long time, Fincher’s Zodiac, Dominik’s film is not so much interested in the crimes themselves as he is in the people committing them. Both films also start off with an impressively staged crime scene almost as if to simply get it out of the way before moving on to a fascinating investigation of the people associated with the crime. Unlike Zodiac, however, Dominik’s film also has a clear and even famous ending, and the titular act of violence is easily the best scene in the entire film, radiating a kind of unavoidable fatality that elevates the lethal gunshot from a just another bang to a very strong sense of epochal change (also due to the expert build-up to this crucial point).

 

In terms of narrative, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is essentially a suspension bridge between the violent train robbery at Blue Cut that opens the film and the gunslinger’s assassination and aftermath that end it, with the long middle section gently curving down and then upwards again and undeniably necessary to reach the other side. There is a clear influence of director Terence Malick (The Thin Red Line, The New World) at work here, though the story of James and Ford is just as much influenced by the episodic serial stories and novels of the time such as published in the Jesse James magazines that Ford collected as a child (at least in the film).

 

The film is certainly taken with the majestic land- and skyscapes and scrubbed and pleasingly decorated Country Living interiors that surround the characters, but it is also interested in their psychological make-up and in old-fashioned storytelling that reveals its characters by simply letting their day-to-day activities speak for themselves. As far as westerns and their depiction of Jesse James go, this might be one of the most domesticated versions of the outlaw to date, though this does in no way undermine the very strong sense of menace he carries around with him everywhere, with all characters constantly worrying about their well-being and James's possible impact on it -- even if he is far away.

 

Robert Ford (Affleck) was a nobody who became a participant in the last train robbery of the James brothers and then a tolerated companion of the sort-of retired Jesse James (Pitt) before finally shooting the outlaw and securing his own eternal fame (or infamy, depending on how you look at it). Along the way, we meet some of the members of the gang, including Ford’s older brother (Sam Rockwell), James’s older brother (Sam Shepard), their cousin Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider) and the womaniser Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner). 

 

With Affleck as the primus inter pares, acting by the ensemble cast is as finely tuned as its period detail, though Affleck, who is 32, and Pitt, at 43, look older than their characters Ford and James, who were 34 and 19 at the time the film opens. Their mutual attraction/repulsion is the driving force behind the film, as if (again, at least in the film) the two knew from the start that their destinies were entwined. This pronounced undercurrent surfaces most clearly in a spine-chilling scene in which James fondles Ford’s hair before ruthlessly putting a knife to his throat; the scene underlines how the two men live in a perpetual kill-or-be-killed situation that is not unagreeable with their characters but rather a part of it.

 

The ever lurking sense of danger between men carries an erotic charge that eventually spills over into the Talented Mr Ripley school of attraction in which a hero (Greenleaf, or in this case James) is so admired by a young hanger-on (Ripley, Ford) that it is never clear whether he is in love with his hero or just in love with the idea of becoming this hero himself. (Like in Minghella’s take on Ripley, this crucial information comes to the fore in a scene involving the hero in a bathtub.)  

 

Production values are exceptionally strong across the board, including Christopher S. Aud’s sound design, which is niftily used to amplify James’s menace in several scenes, most notably in the incredibly staged and edited Blue Cut train robbery sequence.