For all of its breathtaking vistas, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is most spellbinding when lingering in the shadows of its madmen and murderers.
"They're all lies," confides Brad Pitt's James early on to Casey Affleck's Ford, a fawning member and future Judas of the desperado's gang.
The topic -- like the film itself -- is one with an intensely modern bearing: The mythologizing of celebrity. James, a living legend at 34, is both keenly aware yet dismissively contemptuous of his own stardom. Immortalized in dime-store novels as a Robin Hood-esque figure, he is hunted by lawmen and worshipped by strangers. That he is played here by Pitt -- perhaps this world's most- famed celebrity -- only intensifies the parallels between the past and present day.
Yet Andrew Dominik's exquisite epic, which far exceeds the confines of the western genre, is also much more than a blunt contemplation of fame. It is poetic and haunting and wise, and represents the boldest brand of filmmaking: The kind that clings to your bones long after the credits have rolled. Indeed, with its themes of desire, delusion and derangement, Jesse James shares many characteristics not of the duster but of film noir.
Narrated by passages lifted directly from Ron Hansen's 1983 novel, the film begins on what would be James' final birthday. Virtually estranged from his brother Frank (Sam Shepard) and his gang largely comprising homicidal nitwits and not-bright rubes, it is in the hours before a train robbery when Jesse meets Ford, brother of gang member Charlie (Sam Rockwell).
Robert, long captivated by the legend of the James brothers, is as much a fan and stalker as aspiring outlaw.
Affleck, in a career breakthrough, plays Ford as a snivelling sycophant who, unhinged by rejection and self-loathing, ultimately betrays the object of his pathological affection.
Pitts' James, meanwhile, vacillates between viciousness and vulnerability. A manic depressive who kills indiscriminately, James is superstitious, cunning and all but consumed by mounting -- and justified -- paranoia. The end is near, he senses, he just doesn't know from where. Or from whom.
Throughout, Dominik's characters express themselves in whispers and silences and bursts of violence. The bleak terrain they ride is never as ominous or potentially lethal as conversations on horseback, or around the dinner table. And the vast, never-ending horizons, thick with mood and menace, are more disturbing than romantic, more paralyzing than freeing.
This is a masterpiece.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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