The current western revival might be leaving you cold – aren’t westerns just boys-own gun fests? What relevance do westerns have now anyway? Well, this is the film to change your mind. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is an epic piece of art that gives a palpable sense of a time and place long gone and is also an intelligent meditation on the nature of celebrity.
The story of Jesse James’ demise is enshrined in western folklore. There he was, hanging a picture in his living room, when the no-good coward Robert Ford shot him in the back. It’s as famous, in its own way, as the murder of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth in the Ford Theatre in 1865. We dog the footsteps of an icy-cold Brad Pitt as Jesse James (the narration informing us that ‘Jesse was sick … with wounds and aches and lung congestions … insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot … he read auguries in the snarled intestines of chickens or the blow of cat hair released to the wind…’) as he plays out jobs in the company of cut-price hired hands, robbing trains and the like, in-between posing as a family man and a business man – but James is a hero past his time, the character that people conjured in their heads is long gone from the real world (if he ever existed at all).
It’s difficult to avoid comparisons with the great Terence Malick here – the film’s subtly non-linear, episodic nature coupled with narration has his unmistakeable feel. Also present, also resonant of Malick’s approach – is the compelling sense of the environment, the era and the frontier world. A quiet place, long before the dull roar of not just mass-production cars and air travel, but the increased population we’ve become accustomed to. Houses sit alone in the landscape, outposts far from anywhere. The evocation is captivatingly rendered by Roger Deakins’ expert cinematography, styling the film like a passport to the past, modelled on old photographs with faded, blurry corners.
There’s no denying the film’s epic length, but, equally, you can’t deny the film's worth as a great piece of cinema either.
Subtitles (English, Arabic, Hebrew, Icelandic), Subtitles for hard of hearing (English)
Film Description
Based on the 1983 novel by Ron Hansen, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford depicts the final few months of the legendary bandit. Robert Ford (a breakthrough performance by Casey Affleck) managed to snag a place in James' inner circle, but the young man's insecurity led him to turn on his idol, leading to a destructive path that ultimately ended in James' anticlimactic death - and brought Ford the notoriety he had always wanted.
