d+kaz

Director: Andrew Dominik.  Country: USA. Year: 2007.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has an aura of specialness about it that can be misleading. Exquisitely shot by the great Roger Deakins in a manner that, in combination with director Andrew Dominik’s thoughtful, existential adaptation of Ron Hansen’s book, calls to mind the work of Terence Malick, and the film’s meta-casting of Brad Pitt as the legendary Jesse James one might consider the film one of pretentious artistic ambitious and revisionist aspirations. But Dominik’s film is not myth-investigating, nor a comment on “The Western,” but rather a film, plain and simple, which, like Robert Ford (a wondrous, dreamy performance by Casey Affleck), has lived in a world where real life has been transformed into pulp nickel-store novels and the real difficulty is believing anything anymore. The Assassination… takes what would be a subject for another film entirely—Jesse James, the man behind the legend, behind the dozens of books and stories to this name, behind the much-reproduced photos of his corpse, behind Robert Ford’s own theatrical reproduction of his assassination—and turns this theme of authenticity inwards to a film world where no one trusts anyone else, let alone themselves. Jesse hangs over all the men of his gang with a suspicious knowingness that would make even the innocent uneasy, and for all of Dominik and Deakin’s gorgeous exterior shots, the soul of their film is the leisurely tension of minor conversations, of the weight of Jesse’s legend making even the most basic dialogue with him into something ulterior. It is not just a matter of whether the man lives up to what is said about him—and this initially seems the arc of the film, as Robert Ford joins the James gang because he grew up idolizing Jesse’s legend—but rather whether any man can convincingly live his life and act when he wants to with assuredness. That is the gist of the title which of course gives it all away; the issue isn’t what Robert Ford does but rather how he does it, how he can convince Jesse he won’t kill him, and how Ford can simultaneously convince himself to do the dirty deed.

To get to this cinema of belief Dominik has gathered a tremendous cast of actors—Sam Rockwell, Garret Dillhunt, Sam Shepard, and Paul Schneider foremost among them—and grants their characters interiority. It is as if, in one of the film’s few “revisionist” gestures if one can call it that, Dominik took stock characters usually filled by character actors, the loser brother, the ladies man, the dimwit, and gave them an inner mystery, something clearly working inside them, something they are turning over inside themselves, that gives them each that Malick thing, that consideration, that abstract search for something in themselves and the discrepancy between their inner world and in the world around them. And it is these full-bodied, worrying characters that face off with Jesse James and his legend, not to mention other members of the gang, and again and again have to test each other and themselves in just how much they believe their own motivations and those of the dangerous men around them. So perhaps the film is revisionist in its way, making Jesse James analogous to a kind of pre-modern media saturation, for no one in Dominik’s film ever seems to feel at ease with themselves, as if Jesse James the man has combined with the aura of Jesse James the legend and everyone fidgets at the birth of a world where there is a new layer of meaning, mystery, and disconnection between everyone and everyday things. And as the world gets much more complicated in this manner it seemingly becomes all the more beautiful, figures in the landscape through opaque windows, stalwart, lonely old houses, the fall of natural light in rooms and on the plains—as Ford and the others come face to face with this man-legend the world takes on a preciousness, where the everyday interacts with the legendary to make the world around oneself crystalline and exquisite, banal conversations possibly going down in legend and every look, action, and conversation couched in the possibilities of fame and demise in the vicinity of the man Jesse James.

Director: Andrew Dominik. Screenplay: Andrew Dominik, from the novel by Ron Hansen. Cast: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Paul Schneider. Country: USA. Year: 2007.