Just who is the coward?
How It Rates: ***
Starring: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard, Mary-Louise Parker, Paul Schneider
Rated: R
Red Flags: Graphic Gun Violence, Mild Language, One Scene With Brief Sexual Talk
Jesse James shot at least 15 people and robbed more than a dozen banks, and yet he is remembered as a hero among his contemporaries -- mostly by unreconstructed secessionists after the Civil War. Robert Ford is remembered as a coward, even though he ended the criminal career of an extremely dangerous man. The Assassination Of Jesse James... plays like a funeral procession for both men, slow and sad and tedious at times, hyphenated with narration fit for a eulogy or a wild-west version of Dragnet. It's another one of those movies you can label with the all-purpose tagline: "The story you never heard."
The film picks up shortly before James (Pitt) and his brother Frank (Shepard) carry out their last bank robbery in late 1800's Missouri. With most of their gang either arrested or dead, they turn to petty thieves to carry out the job. One of them is a young Robert Ford (Affleck), a baby-faced, mumbling 19-year-old old James fanboy who approaches Frank and begs to a part of the gang like his older brother Charley (Sam Rockwell).
The younger Ford makes an unlikely outlaw with his pasty complexion and his emotional vulnerability. If you hurt his feelings, he's more likely to cry than kill you. Jesse delights in testing his cohort's toughness, while at the same time expressing similar fits of paranoia and weakness. He roughs up a boy in one scene and cries in the next. And still, James is a sympathetic character, "dungeoned" by illness and his outlaw temper.
Most of the film deals with Jesse's struggles after the last train robbery. With the law and Pinkertons on his tail, he is unable to hide behind an alias, and he moves about the country tying up loose ends and killing off traitors while plotting crimes that never come to fruition. In the meantime, the Fords see James' growing instability and cruelty, eventually striking a deal with Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden to bring James in.
Calling The Assassination... a Western doesn't seem fitting, unless you want to call it Western Psychodrama or Western Art-House. It is adapted from a novel by Ron Hansen which explains its plodding pacing and character development. This is not a movie for your average Western fan. But its redeeming quality is forcing us to rethink the glory of the Jesse James legend and the condemnation of the man who took his life.
James died from a bullet to the head while dusting off a picture, shot by Ford from behind. I challenge you to watch the moments leading up to this scene carefully and decide for yourself whether Ford acted as a coward. The ambiguity of the events justifies multiple interpretations. History, unlike legends and folk songs, isn't cut and dried.
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