The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

The focus of the discussion around The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (2007) centres on its main themes of mass-media circus and celebrity obsession. And rightly so due to our current cultural climate But as director Andrew Dominik displayed with his last (and first) feature, Chopper (2000), his interest is in the power struggle and fascination felt between two men – where one is charismatic and psychotic, the other weak but infatuated.

Where the aesthetic of Chopper was claustrophobic and grainy – with tight interior shots in the cell and home dominated by Eric Bana as Chopper (reminiscent of the palpable violence and menace of Ray Winstone in Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth (1998)) – Jesse James is full of light, colour and the wide expanse of middle America. There’s no mistaking the sumptuous work of cinematographer Roger Deakins (involved in anything by the Coen Brothers).

Sam Rockwell (Charley Ford) and Casey Affleck (Robert Ford) steal the show here, with Rockwell arguably the standout – his attempts to diffuse various situations with laughter and jokes makes for compelling viewing.

Brad Pitt’s (Jesse James) performance is layered and nuanced and the menace – especially sitting at the dinner table with Charley, Robert and Zee James (Mary Louise Parker) – is almost childlike as he plays with the taught emotion of the room.

Childishness is something that runs throughout the film. None of these ‘men’ seem to have grown out of adolescence. When Robert finds his brother Charley and Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner) rummaging through his box of Jesse James paraphernalia, the scene is one of boyhood bedroom bullying. The boys sleep and eat together, dormitory style, and crash around the house in fights and shouts.

Robert cannot shake off his childlike wonder and affection for James until he has shot him in the head and then recreated the murder a thousand times on stage. Affleck gives a supreme performance in awkward obsession.

Jesse James represents a period of change. A cowboy with one foot stuck in the stirrup of the past, the other on the industrial ground of the onrushing Victorian era. Holding up the train, James stands symbolically on lumber piled up on the track – the dark forest all around him, the steam-train lighting him up like a beacon. Later, when Robert and Charley flee James’ home having committed murder, we see spread across the valley floor, for the first time, an industrial landscape of factories and brick homes. Behind, silhouetted against the clear sky, James’ home, alone, on the edge of nothing.