Iona Firouzabadi
posted 7 January 2008

In antebellum America, Missouri marked the border between Yankee and Southern values. When the Civil War came it stayed with the Union but also maintained slavery and substantial sympathy for the Confederacy - it was a state at once respectable and rebel. In 1847 Missouri had given birth to Jesse James, and there, 34 years later, Robert Ford would murder him.

In the life between, Jesse lived as an outlaw, a legend and a celebrity – while America went to war with itself and forged the modern United States. Jesse was one of the first in a lineage of American criminals to be lionised as exemplars, not of death and darkness, but of light and freedom, exemplars of how America likes to see itself. Andrew Dominik’s beautiful and nuanced film delivers us both Jesse and his riven Missouri, not as dark or light but as restlessly clouded skies, still casting shadows over a modern nation.

Dominik’s film, heavily based on Ron Hansen’s novel of the same name, renders Jesse in the Fall of his life. The great days of the James-Younger gang are past and Jesse (Brad Pitt) and his older brother Frank (Sam Shepherd) now run with a rag-tag bag of callow chancers, including brothers Charley (Sam Rockwell) and Robert Ford (Casey Affleck). Robert is an acolyte – a fan – a pre-emptive echo of John Lennon’s killer, Mark Chapman. But in this telling he is also Brutus and Judas, to a Jesse whose paranoia and failing power are brooding ghosts of Macbeth and Lear. As the film charts the final months of Jesse’s life, we see a man haunted by fears of betrayal; we see his cruelty and his humour, his shifting, erratic moods - and his intuition and depression, visiting him like auguries of death.

Assassination seems a strong term for the killing of a robber and murderer, but Dominik’s film exists on a tragic scale and makes subtle but coherent reference to the killing of Jesse as both an archetypal and a political act. We hear Confederate songs sung at the gang’s woodland camp and when Ford’s adulation for Jesse turns to resentment, Federal lawmen enter the story and become complicit in Ford’s cold-blooded killing. And there is a genuine historical case for representing Jesse’s murder as political. Prior to the Civil War his family were slave owners, in 1863 his stepfather was hung by Federal troops and in 1864 Jesse joined a Confederate guerrilla unit. This is how his gang life began, and throughout his career Southern sympathisers supported him, while Unionists were used as informants by the authorities. By the 1880s, when the film begins, the hunt was closing in on Jesse James – he was part of an older America and his time was over.

Pitt’s Jesse James is not the flashy hero of previous Westerns. Dominik and Hansen are fully aware of the Robin Hood tradition and immediately dispel it with their clear-eyed narrative of a train robbery. Neither is Jesse portrayed as a rebel without a cause, a Godfather or a psychopath. In this revisionist story Pitt manages to communicate agedness beyond his or Jesse’s years, but symptomatic of one that knows he is in physical and mental decline. He’s an enigmatic character, but he’s not mythic. This Jesse James is a man who no longer trusts and keeps himself closed, all too knowing of his imminent fall -perhaps, the film suggests, even complicit in it. Pitt’s face is often occluded with unseen worries, or contorted with depression or manic laughter, mean as a Missouri winter. Next to Pitt’s crumbled leader, Affleck’s Robert Ford is a whey-faced wannabe, hesitant yet arrogant. Ford is alternately bullied, reviled and distrusted – but Jesse maintains a fatal policy of keeping his enemy close.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford makes a slow dance towards death. At nearly three hours, it’s as long as its title promises, but it communicates the tone and tempo of a different era. These are people who live with the land and the seasons in an America before time zones. Roger Deakin’s repeated time-lapse shots of clouds scudding across vast skies unsettlingly emphasise the passing of time, to a mesmeric music box score by Warren Ellis and Nick Cave. Using a scrubbed-down, bleached-out palette of colours, often monochrome, Deakin’s cinematography feels at once new and antique. An effect added to by the striking, intermittent use of filters producing a radial blur around a clear central image - as if looking through an old kaleidoscope. In both the palette and several shot compositions there are shades of impressionism – particularly Whistler – and the then new art of photography.

And near the close photography plays its historic part, as Dominik reconstructs the photographing of Jesse’s corpse for a picture that would be sold across the states many times over. When Ford finally kills him, in cold blood but also in fear for his own and his brother’s life, the film does not end, but continues beyond Jesse’s grave just as his fame does. After the tragic fall there’s a distinct epilogue that extracts and examines the running themes of fame and myth-making. Ford had idolised the Jesse James of dime novels and ‘bandit weeklies’; he identified with a man he didn’t know but whose fame created a false familiarity. At the last, we see Ford, in a bizarre and morbid self-made groundhog day, taking a show about the country, restaging night after night the scenario of the assassination. And so this most alien part of the film, filled with the strange gaslight and grease paint of 19th century American theatres and that very Victorian obsession, death, is also it’s most reflexively contemporary element: it’s here that we see the grotesquery of celebrity.

Jesse James was shot in the back by Robert Ford, but his untimely death placed him at the mythic heart of an America looking for a national identity – just as Missouri now resides firmly in the heartland of the Midwest and is no longer has an affinity with the South. Andrew Dominik’s film, which infamously took two years to cut, is an extraordinary meditation on a past era and on our own.