It has taken just over a century to transform outlaw Jesse James into a mythical 'Robin Hood'-style character, but Andrew Domink's 2007 epic The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford goes a long way towards balancing the scales and showing that Jesse James was just a flawed human being.
In fact, Brad Pitt's portrayal of the younger James brother shows him to be seriously unbalanced and generally quite unlikeable.
Following the events that unfold after the James' gangs final train robbery, as the gang fractures and Jesse becomes increasingly paranoid about the law closing in on him, The Assassination Of Jesse James... takes its time to lay the groundwork for the inevitable conclusion and its rather sordid and pathetic aftermath.
The two-and-a-half hour film, which is a more a slice of Western life than a traditional "Wild West" movie, shows up nearly all of Jesse's gang as social rejects, perverts and lowlifes... only his older brother, Frank (Sam Shephard) and Robert's brother, Charlie Ford (Sam Rockwell), come out with their dignity intact.
The slowly unfolding tale, a damning indictment of the seemingly 21st Century "cult of celebrity", centres around young Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), his hero worship of Jesse James fuelled by press cuttings and dime novel accounts of the outlaw's exploits, and the crashing realisation that the man doesn't measure up to the myth.
While most people with a passing knowledge of the Old West will know the story of Bob Ford shooting Jesse James in the back, it was what happened next that came as an eye opener to me; Bob Ford's misguided belief that he, in turn, would become as big a celebrity or even be declared a hero rapidly unravelling into a cheap life of 'kill-and-tell' revelations (with his touring play substituting for the tabloid magazines of today) and eventual ignoble death in a mining camp years later.
The Assassination of Jesse James... is a fine film for fans of revisionist westerns, from Open Range and Unforgiven to Deadwood.
Although maybe not as pacy as its predecessors it still carries the viewer along with its sweeping landscapes and the poetic rhythm of dialogue that gives these pieces that certain verisimilitude that earlier Westerns, where everyone spoke Hollywood/Californian, might fall short on.
