By Armond White

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Directed by Andrew Dominick


Brad Pitt sure is a movie star and director-writer Andrew Dominik depends on Pitt’s cute looks to propel the long, presumptuous, overweening western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Pitt plays Jesse James, the legendary outlaw of the 1880s, like an early movie star—a charismatic figure with devilish, heavy-lidded eyes, robbing and killing among the benighted throng of early American settlers. This sociopath attracts the stalker-like allegiance of a young, nickel novel-reading psychopath, Robert Ford (played by Casey Affleck), who is eager to join Jesse’s gang.

Dominik starts with easy/queasy parallels to modern celebrity worship. Ford is a slack-jawed yokel, over determined to get close to the celebrated train robber. But then Dominik digresses into visual essays on the period. These lyrical etudes on history, pop culture and machismo take up most of the movie’s running time. Dominik’s self-conscious emphasis on ephemera poses Jesse and Ford in picturesque western settings like images in old-time stereopticons. Cinematographer Roger Deakins accentuates the past through use of refracted lenses—history recalled via contrived antique technology.

The entire film is a conceit. It signals Dominik’s intention to reproduce the now-vaunted postmodern aspects of ’70s moviemaking—those great westerns by Peckinpah, Aldrich, Altman, Penn and Hill. Yet, while recalling the comically extended title of Robert Altman’s great 1976 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson—where Altman used Paul Newman’s star power to analyze the beauty and terror of American showbiz and gangster legend—Dominik stops short of true revisionism. He uses Brad Pitt’s iconography without the inquiring skepticism of Altman’s satire. Instead, Dominik merely swoons over Pitt/Jesse, entrapped by macho mystique.

This all might have worked had Pitt exuded more personality—like his sexy swagger in Fight Club or his romantic glow in Meet Joe Black. Pitt’s not a strong enough actor to make the enigma of a pathological killer compelling. He lacks the feral menace that Eric Bana brought to Dominik’s 1999 Australian real-life killer thriller, Chopper. Dominik treats Jesse James as a mythic figure, idolizing criminality as an American essence and mistaking this personal enthrallment as something profound.

Hours are wasted with artsy wallowing in the interactions of the James gang: petty-minded men who glom after Jesse’s cold-blooded bravura. Not just Robert Ford, but his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), the skirt-chasing Liddil (Paul Schneider), cousin Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner) and other miscreants leach onto Jesse’s stardom. Dominik loves looking at and listening to actors carry on. The men’s voices go soft or high—cracks in machismo as startling as Pitt’s raw, chewed-looking lips. Here’s Dominik’s mother lode: following some strain of errant homosexual attraction among these men. Despite numerous reasons to suspect Ford’s leach-like attentions, Jesse gifts him with a fateful custom gun. “You’re gonna break a lot of hearts,” Jesse says with the blatantly phallic offering. When Ford sneaks up on Jesse bathing nude (and Dominik lavishes attention on Pitt’s bare back), the outlaw wonders: “I can’t figure it out. Do you want to be like me or you want to be me?”

At one point, Jesse even says to Ford, “You’re acting queer,” which underscores that his infamy creates a sexualized myth haunting every wannabe gangster. It’s all cute, but it’s also shallow. Dominik confuses the dynamics of two kinds of sociopathy with a genuine appraisal of American history. Fact is, The Assassination is nothing more than a misreading of Hollywood mythology.

It is the film’s crystalline photography that reveals Dominik and Deakins mostly had specific 1970s landmarks in mind: They facetiously copy the arty naturalism of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and the pop-artiness of Coppola’s male soap opera, The Godfather. But Dominik’s script lacks Coppola’s narrative drive. The comprehensible human tragedies that Jesse James and Robert Ford left to history are glossed over by too much surface elegance and not enough substance. While Dominik emulates the last great period of American filmmaking innovation (with its complex examination of social tradition), his movie still seems remote from what motivated those artists who set out to investigate the national legacies they inherited.

Dominik plays that Tarantino-generation game of moral detachment; he’s excited by the display of violence in cultural forms from pulp movies to grindhouse movies. But that idiot-savantry—romanticizing Jesse James and Ford’s sickness—is a way of inflating his own adolescent silliness. There’s a tremendous gap in Dominik’s film knowledge: He doesn’t know—or understand—the transforming postmodernism of Walter Hill’s 1980 historical myth, The Long Riders. When Hill’s Robert Ford (Christopher Guest) aimed his gun at his idol and pronounced, “I Shot Jesse James,” it also evoked American mythology (including the title of Sam Fuller’s 1949 feature) to the nth degree. Dominik does little more than recreate the fake, burnish historicism of Road to Perdition.

At nearly 3 hours, these characters’ motivations remain bunched-up and attenuated except for moments of romantic pique and jealous infatuation (a cameo by Nick Cave doesn’t help). The Assassination is the silliest-solemnest art-western in years. Given Pitt’s ambitious collaboration, Dominik has fabricated a big picture with a small point.