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

When The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was released on DVD, Mark Kermode of the Guardian wrote that "When the books documenting the history of 21st century film are written, Andrew Dominik's magical feature will surely feature as one of the most wrongly neglected masterpieces of its era."¹ I would have to agree with this statement wholeheartedly. This film is, in my experience, one of the best of the past ten years or so. Although it heavily suffered at the box office and wasn't exactly a huge hit with critics, both audiences and critics are now returning to the film and realizing how much of a masterpiece it really is. As of today, the film has made twice as much money in DVD sales as it did in theaters: which to me, seems to justify Kermode's description of the film as a "neglected masterpiece".

The story is, well, exactly what the title says: the assassination of the famous outlaw Jesse James. But despite taking place in the Old West, I strongly believe that this film is not a Western. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it focuses so little on action and is so tonally dissimilar from other Westerns that it may very well belong in a different genre together. But while Butch Cassidy just narrowly manages to qualify as a Western, The Assassination of Jesse James is a far more difficult film to classify: in fact, it's more akin to Shakespearean drama than it is to films like Stagecoach or True Grit. This can be attributed to the film's source material: a book of the same title by author Ron Hansen. Hansen intended to write his novel in such a way that was both thoroughly researched, historically accurate, and yet emotionally moving, so that the depth of the story's realism balanced with the profound themes. Director Andrew Dominik manages to translate this to the screen without missing a beat. This way, the film is based on true events, yet relates those events to us using motifs borrowed from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Both are stories of a leader being betrayed and murdered by his followers; in both stories, the leader has an odd prescience of his own death, and much time is devoted to examining the nobility of the assassins' actions. What this results in is a film which centers on two things: firstly, an exploration of a relationship between two complex characters, a relationship riddled with obsession, jealousy, and subtle homoerotic subtext, and secondly, an exploration of fame and how it complicates that relationship. The film has the kinds of grand themes that one might expect in an epic novel: in fact, some critics have criticized it for seeming too bookish: "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford represents a breakthrough in the moviegoing experience. It may be the first time we’ve been asked to watch a book on tape."² But what this critic fails to notice is that this movie is not simply a film adaptation of a book: it is heavily stylized in a way that constantly justifies the medium.

Andrew Dominik and cinematographer Roger Deakins (who you may know from  almost every Coen Brothers film ever) worked together to create a distinct visual look for the film which borrows from old photographs, the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, and Terrence Malick's film Days of Heaven. Deakins himself explains, "Most of those shots were used for transitional moments, and the idea was to create the feeling of an old-time camera. We weren’t trying to be nostalgic, but we wanted those shots to be evocative."³ Shots which establish different chapters in the narrative will be curiously tinted and blurred around the edges, and will focus on the natural scenery that sets the stage for the characters to unravel themselves. Very often throughout the film, Deakins will use time-lapse. This is to draw attention to one very important aspect of the film: time.

Early on in the film, we are told that being in the presence of Jesse James made one feel like time was becoming stretched out. When we finally get to that climactic assassination scene, it seems to go on and on forever, tension building with every moment in expectation of the inevitable. In a way, the entire film is contained within that moment, in the sense that the film's pace on the whole is long and slow, and sometimes seems uneven: the story takes long detours for the sake of keeping a realistic grip on the actual events that it draws from. But the challenging pace of the film never leads you to lose interest in the film, because it isn't just there to enhance the realism of the film, but also to enhance the mountain tension between Jesse James and his young admirer Robert Ford. The seven months from the opening of the film to the assassination are deliberately prolonged for us, so that by contrast, the years after the event fly by like minutes, plunging us into the perspective of Robert Ford, who, the moment he becomes famous, finds that life flies by far too quickly for him to handle. Thus the film's final fifteen minutes seem to cram in just as much information as is contained in the film's first two and a half hours, and that's not an insult to either half of the film: both the main bulk of the film and the epilogue are equally powerful, and we end on the perfect note. Christopher Orr of the Atlantic writes that the film "takes its time and rewards those willing to do the same."⁴

The film begins as Robert Ford joins the James gang. He idolizes Jesse James and is eager to pursue many adventures with him, but it just so happens that he has joined the group during their last robbery. James knows that the government is closing in on him and that these are his final days, and so the fantastic train robbery sequence at the film's beginning is for him, the beginning of the end, and so throughout the film we are watching in his character, the decline and fall of an American legend. But as the film clearly points out, James was no hero-- he was no Southern guerrilla fighter, nor was he a "Robin Hood of the West"-- all his crimes were for his own personal benefit. In the film, Jesse James treats crimefighting as if it were just another job, and keeps it separate from his otherwise peaceful family life. As Robert Ford discovers or fails to discover the difference between the man and the myth that's been built up around him, he begins to develop a bittersweet resentment which slowly leads him to kill his hero, and in today's age of celebrity culture, I think the character evolution of Ford in this film is sadly becoming more and more relevant to our times. But what's so important about the film and its finale is what it says about youth and adulthood. Ford's tragedy is that, in his youth, he allows his impulsive tendencies to manifest in acts of violence, and like James he emerges bloodstained and haunted: this is amplified by the fact that he literally repeats the past over and over again in dramatized reenactments of the killing, where he revels in his own fame, and yet, simultaneously is forced to ponder his past actions until he reaches his breaking point. In contrast to his early, pathetic, slimy persona at the beginning of the film, the Robert Ford that is portrayed at the end of the film is more seasoned, solemn, and reflective. But by the time his desire for fame has worn off, the damage has already been done, and he discovers the dark side of fame as the public's adoration of him soon turns to loathing. Observing this, one critic cleverly points out that perhaps this was part of Jesse's plan all along: 

As his career draws to an end, Jesse James becomes aware of the impossibility of facing an increasingly vast army of sheriffs, federal agents and Pinkerton men. He senses that, inevitably, one of his gang will in any case sell him out for a fat reward. Unwilling to give the lawmen that satisfaction, James embraces his own death and subtly cultivates the mercurial attentions of the most obviously cringing and cowardly of his associates: 20-year-old Robert Ford. With the taunts and whims of a lover, he encourages Ford's envious, murderous fascination, and grooms him as his own killer, so that his own legend will be pristine after his death. He engineers a character-assassination of Ford, and the title, knowingly, gets it precisely the wrong way around.⁵

After watching the film, we know that Ford, despite his pathetic and slimy demeanor, is no coward. And we also no that James is no hero, making the killing more than a murder but far less than an assassination. The title, like the rest of the film, is lengthy, but its length is there to alert you to something, in this case, it's alerting you to the deceptive nature of legends, how, the story that winds up being repeated is often far from the way things really are, and that when we can't tell the difference between legend and reality, between fame and infamy, between mere popularity and true greatness, we are really setting ourselves up for disastrous consequences, and perpetuating a cycle that is destined to repeat itself over and over.

Sources:

¹Kermode, Mark. "When outlaws fatally fall out". Guardian, 29 Mar. 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/mar/30/dvdreviews.bradpitt. Accessed 8 Jan. 2017.

²Zacharek, Stephanie. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". Salon, 21 Sep. 2007, http://www.salon.com/2007/09/21/jesse_james/. Accessed 8 Jan. 2017.

³Pizello, Steven and Jean Oppenheimer. "Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC explores the existential perils of the American West in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men." American Cinematographer, Oct. 2007. http://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/October2007/QAWithDeakins/page2.php. Accessed 8 Jan. 2017.

⁴Orr, Christopher. "The Movie Review: 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford'". Atlantic, 5 Oct. 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2007/10/the-movie-review-the-assassination-of-jesse-james-by-the-coward-robert-ford/68387/. Accessed 8 Jan. 2017.

⁵Bradshaw, Peter. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". Guardian, 29 Nov. 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/nov/30/3. Accessed 8 Jan. 2017.