THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (2007)

The internets claim that when Brad Pitt signed onto this film he had it put in his contract that the studio could not modify the title.  That may be the first thing he did to ensure the greatness of this movie, but the second and more important thing he did is give a brilliant performance.  Pitt as Jesse James is a far cry from what might be expected from the man known as the Robin Hood of postbellum Missouri.  He is not a noble leader of a band of merry men, and he does not steal from the rich to give to the poor; he is boss to a hired pack of thieves and killers, and he steals because that is what he trained to do as a youth in the Civil War and he knows nothing else.  In the last year and so many months of his life that this film dramatizes, James is a paranoid psychotic, murdering in cold blood anyone who might conspire to turn him over to the authorities despite also trusting worse and worse men in his desperation to recruit a posse, with violent mood swings such as a sobbing fit immediately following the extended needless beating and interrogation of a thirteen year old boy.  He is not Robin Hood.

Andrew Dominik adapts Ron Hansen's book into an atypical western, more staid and stoic than crowd-pleasing or thrill-seeking but still containing plenty of tension, bloodshed, and confrontation.  When outlaws are the protagonists, we usually expect them to be good and the lawmen to be corrupt and evil, in a simple reversal of the morality of a classic western.  Any film, especially a western, is noticeably different when it does not have heroes and villains, but simply characters.  The cinematography may be colorful and gorgeous, whether indoors or outdoors or day or night, but the morality is all gray.  The biggest judgment made is the use of the word 'assassination' instead of murder or betrayal but this is also a period detail, correctly showing how people of the time reacted.  Actually the bigger judgment might come at the very end, when a certain event is very noticeably omitted from the film.

The process by which this film was cut down from its rumored original run time of somewhere between 3 and 4 hours into the trim 2 1/2 hours it now runs was quite cruel.  Mary-Louise Parker appears as James's wife Zee and is omnipresent within their household although I don't remember her having any lines until about an hour and forty five minutes in.  Somebody named Jim Cummins gets mentioned frequently but never appears, although this might have been intentional.  Another distaff casualty of the serious editing seems to be Zooey Deschanel, who has only a scant few minutes of screen time near the end of the film.  I suspect that the segments of the film that occur after James's death were the most severely cut, and this is when Deschanel's character shows up for a brief conversation and a song (the fact that she sings should have made this film mandatory viewing for hipsters).

The still-appearing supporting cast that makes up the gang is uniformly excellent.  Paul Schneider, the ladies man Mark Brendanawicz from Parks And Recreation, plays ladies man Dick Liddil, quoting poetry and begging off questions about what separates the lovemaking of a squaw from a white woman.  Jeremy Renner from The Hurt Locker plays Wood Hite, a cousin of James who exploits this connection to bully the other gang members and compensate for his shortcomings both professional and romantic.  Garret Dilahunt, the same year he was in No Country For Old Men, plays another not-too-bright fella, Ed Miller, whose nervous manner leads James to think he's hiding things even when he's just terrified of James.  Sam Shepard plays the elder James brother Frank, who takes leave of his troubled brother shortly after their final, successful train robbery, a nighttime sequence with lantern light that is a highlight of the film and a testament to cinematographer Roger Deakins's mastery of the camera.

Even most of the smaller parts are filled in with strong players.  Tom Aldredge, best known as Carmela's father on The Sopranos but also as Nucky's father on Boardwalk Empire and who literally died while I wrote this, shows up as Renner's father whose new young wife's flirtations with Dick Liddil lead to fractures in the already seriously unstable gang.  Ted Levine, Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs and the captain from Monk, is a private detective.  Michael Parks, frequently a lawman in Tarantino films, appears as a lawman.  James Carville plays the Governor so don't be distracted when you think you see James Carville late in the film.  Nick Cave composed the music for the film and cameos as a barroom troubadour who runs afoul of one of the very outlaws his songs are based on.

Sam Rockwell is the amiable Charley Ford, who recruits his brother Bob into the gang, only to later see his brother recruit him into the plot against Jesse James, with devastating results on his conscience.  Casey Affleck as Robert Ford might actually be a better performance than Pitt's, but it's much less showy and much less sympathetic.  Affleck was nominated for an Oscar for his work, but in the supporting category (he lost to Javier Bardem), which is an outrage considering the amount of screen time he has and the fact the narrative is centralized around him; in that sense he's like Leo from Gangs Of New York and Pitt is like Bill the Butcher. 

Robert Ford was obsessed with the exploits of the James gang that he read about as a child, and as a young adult, his misguided and overreaching attempts to ingratiate himself with the people around him reveal a fundamental, strange emptiness inside him.  He looks up to Jesse James for so long that it seems inevitable that he will eventually look down on him.  He squirms so much, so uncomfortable in his own skin, and he craves the type of acceptance and definition that is hopelessly impossible to find in the lifestyle of a bandit.  His withdrawn demeanor, youthful features and childish behavior make him an easy target for mockery but they also belie the deep rage burning inside him, which propels him to hold grudges and settles scores any way he can.

The first 3 1/2 minutes of the film are a hypnotic montage with a narrator summarizing the lifestyle of Jesse James that also starts the sustained tone of melancholia that will permeate the entire film.  The opening sequence probably also works well as a test whether or not a viewer will enjoy the film, because it so perfectly encapsulates the mood of the remainder; it also introduces the main recurring musical motif.  Interstitial segments similar to the opening scene appear throughout the story to illustrate the passage of time, fill us in on ancillary details, and sneak a peek inside the characters' heads.  The camera work on these segments is styled after photography of the period, most notably with a diminished color palette and blurring around the edges.

Why did they make the title of the film a spoiler?  Its in the style of the period, but more importantly, it combats a small measure of the ample ambiguity in the film.  Viewers unfamiliar with history might not have known what to expect.  Even characters within the film don't quite know what to expect of Jesse James.  Right up to the end, he is fantastically paranoid, forbidding others to leave his side without asking for permission which he never grants, while at the same time, he seems to engineer his own death.  James compares Ford to another former gang member who tried to kill him, and does so in front of Ford's whole family and the gang, deeply upsetting Ford, and ironically making the comparison even more apt, eventually; James also gifts Ford the gun that would ultimately end his life, and his behavior in the final minute of his life goes miles to suggest a resigned man not only accepting his fate but perhaps designing it.

The biggest compliment I can pay is this: I've seen this film three times and it gets better each time, having started at 'great' and moved up from there.