By James Bowman on 10.1.07 @ 12:02AM
A very slow-moving ode to a celebrity.
I'm old enough to be able to remember from my childhood my
grandmother, born a few years after the death of Jesse James in
1882, singing the ballad she must have learned in her own childhood
whose refrain goes, "But that dirty little coward/That shot Mr.
Howard/Has laid poor Jesse in his grave." It was my first
experience of a genuine folk hero. Of course, we don't have such
things anymore. We have celebrities instead. The long title of
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert
Ford, preserved by director Andrew Dominik (Chopper)
from the novel by Ron Hansen, is meant to call to our minds the
Victorian melodrama and ballad that the event it names was turned
into, but it is misleading. The movie is not really inspired by the
sensibility of the 19th century but by the celebrity culture of the
21st.
In fact, it should really be called "The Ballad of Bob Ford."
Young Casey Affleck plays the cowardly "assassin" -- a title meant
to be suggestive of his victim's celebrity rather than his
notoriety -- as a sort of Mark David Chapman, a fan whose obsession
with his idol tips over the brink of sanity and finally induces him
to kill the one he loves. Brad Pitt's Jesse James, by contrast,
remains a curiously shadowy figure, obviously both charismatic and
dangerous but not actually very interesting. The story is that Mr
Pitt, a native of Missouri like the James brothers, has long been a
fan of the romantic outlaw. If so, perhaps he's the real stalker
here. "Do you want to be like me or do you want to be me?"
Jesse says to Bob in the movie when his worshiper's attentions
begin to creep him out. It's a question that it might occur to the
audience to ask of Mr Pitt himself. The awe he feels on assuming
the character of his hero appears to have paralyzed him.
It might have helped if the movie had included a bit more action
instead of spending so much time -- and, at 160 minutes, it is an
hour too long -- on leisurely atmospheric takes of distant figures
set against vast and poetic prairie landscapes. The look of the
film appears to have been heavily influenced by John Ford's The
Searchers (1956) -- except that lots of things happen in
The Searchers and lots of things don't happen in The
Assassination of Jesse James. Only one of the James gang's
celebrated acts of banditry is depicted in it, and that seems to
have been the last one -- the robbery of a train at Blue Cut,
Missouri, in October of 1881. It's not an especially exciting train
robbery for the viewer. No one is hurt in it except for a clerk who
is badly beaten by Jesse. When he is about to finish the man off
with his six-gun, he is stopped by another member of the gang, Ed
Miller (Garret Dillahunt).
"Don't tell me what I can and cannot do, Ed," says Jesse
menacingly. But he then walks away and, seemingly, allows the clerk
to live.
Ed is later -- much later -- the only man we actually see Jesse
kill, though a voiceover tells us that he was responsible for at
least 17 murders. Obviously, in order to preserve our sympathy for
a man it sees as a prototype of the rock star, the movie has to
play down its hero's less attractive qualities, including his
Confederate loyalties -- the ostensible reason for his outlawry --
and his tendency to mayhem. But neither, equally obviously, can it
allow us to forget the latter. A sense of danger is a big part of
what makes him a rock star. That's why Brad Pitt's stock-in-trade
here is understated menace. Everybody in the gang seems scared to
death of him and we, too, wait eagerly for the explosion of
violence that will confirm his reputation.
It never comes. Or it comes only on the periphery of the main
story and in ways meant to suggest comic absurdity rather than the
sublimity promised by the hero-bandit who is offered for our
admiration. He remains a largely static figure, almost an icon of
the suffering Christ who even seems to will his own death at the
hands of his Judas, Bob Ford. In other words, the movie is itself
an act of celebrity-worship -- as is also suggested by the casting
of James Carville as the governor of Missouri, Tom Crittenden. The
only supposedly deep question that interests it is that of why Bob
Ford doesn't inherit Jesse's celebrity, as he expects to do, when
he kills him -- rather as Prince Hal promises in Shakespeare's
"Henry IV Part One" to win Hotspur's honor for himself by killing
him. But that's not a question the answer to which is really very
hard to figure out.
The movie is also marred by its having cut to the bone the parts
of Frank James (Sam Shepard) and Bob's confidante, Dorothy Evans
(Zooey Deschanel), who don't have ten minutes of screen time
between them. On the plus side, however, I can't fail to mention
the terrific performance of Sam Rockwell as the cringing Charley
Ford, Bob's brother, and the haunting, minimalist score by Nick
Cave and Warren Ellis which almost makes the movie's vast vacant
spaces serve the purpose that its makers want them to serve, which
is to identify the legend of Jesse James with the landscape of
America. But it doesn't strike me as the kind of music that would
have appealed to the historical Jesse James.
topics:
Trade, Law
