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Little known fact: Casey Affleck unsuccessfully auditioned for the part of Vash the Stampede, only to lose the role when he insisted, "LOOKIT MY ARM IS A GUN!"

Standing atop a railway trestle somewhere between Missouri and South Dakota is a ghost, checking his fob watch and resting one hand on the butt of a Colt .45.  He observes the passing of time with the soulful glare of a mad firebrand, or perhaps a whispering pine.  His name is Jesse James, and he does not die alone.  He traverses the landscape of what was once the American frontier, what was once a geography of still-open wounds– if only figuratively, in legacy –  from the ravages of the Civil War.

Jesse’s dead, and his victims ride with him.

Bringing up the rear, eyes and cheeks hollowed by guilt and ill-usage, flickering in and out of nonexistence as his name is slowly effaced from history by the fickle relevancy of curio coffee table books and the odd, half-forgotten folk ballad, is a saloon keeper named Robert Ford.  His few victims do not ride with him; his lovers have buried him and his name in the black ground.  He rides alone, and he cannot muster the spirit to balefully flinch at the echo of a distant locomotive whistle, even if it is a harbinger of progress, that specter to all outlaws of America’s storied,  past.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is not an attempt to de-mythologize the past or to correct misconceptions of the outlaw lifestyle.  Soaked in the autumnal, stark beauty of Roger Deakins’ cinematography, the images are not so much larger than life as more indelible than the strata of the Badlands.  Unfolding with languid grace, Curtis Clayton and  Dylan Tichenor cut the film to the rhythm of amber waves of grain, flecked with the blood of thieves and the spit of tobacco farmers, bound by the moody synesthesia of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s score.  Jesse James remains one of the most recognizable names in the annals of Western legend; virtually no one is familiar with the particulars of his exploits anymore.  His name is a reference point more in connection with how outlaws could be legendary than for anything he did to become legendary.  People still know the name Jesse James, even if it only evokes a hazy mental picture of a gunslinger in a dust jacket and a kerchief pulled up round his nose.  While the film dispels the notion that James was a rootin’-tootin’, rough-ridin’, booze-poundin’ man of action (at least while you watch it), it erects instead a counter-myth of an unknowable enigma in the form of a man — a beautiful, magnetic, sad-eyed man with a mean temper, a loving family, and an impenetrable shroud of loneliness.  Old Jesse died young, he died violently; he died while still at the height of his notoriety.  A century and a half later, he is still deemed worthy of an aesthetically lavish, casually-paced big screen treatment in which he is played by one of the biggest stars in what is arguably the most popular film industry in the world.  He is so legendary that the man who shot him in the back of the head is deemed equally as compelling a subject, despite only being famous for assassinating a famous man.

The man who shot Jesse James is not played by one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.  Casey Affleck is perhaps best known as Ben Affleck’s younger brother.  He will never be a Brad Pitt.  He’s an extraordinary talent who has toiled for years in undistinguished projects, with little discernible ambition toward stardom.  Perhaps he simply lacks that ineffable “star quality” that makes Pitt “It” and Affleck (either one) not “It.”  Casey’s first big scene in the film, opposite Sam Shephard, elicits the judgment from the veteran actor (playing Jesse’s older brother, Frank) that Robert Ford makes the skin crawl.  Recent films starring performers like Will Ferrell or Sacha Baron Cohen have drawn upon the human penchant for discomfort in awkward social situations for laughs.¹  Audiences squirm and giggle because they don’t know what else to do to relieve the tension.  Affleck doesn’t allow the audience that kind of wiggle room.  Robert Ford insinuates himself into the world of Jesse James for reasons that are simultaneously identifiable and realistically tangled.  Like any child, he wishes to emulate his hero –James; though as he enters gawkily into adulthood,  Ford sees the potential of perhaps assuming James’s mantle, if not his identity outright.  Perhaps Robert cottons onto Jesse because he doesn’t have a father figure; his older brother (Sam Rockwell) is a natural-born acolyte, a suck-up, no protector or leader.  Robert also wants to be a legend, but for him to do it, he needs to break away from Jesse James’s shadow, even if he has chosen to grovel in that shadow in the first place.  Jesse might as well be the God that failed.²  Ford worships him, is disappointed and despised by him; loved by him, favored by him; Ford outgrows him, grows to hate him, to disbelieve in him. Ultimately, he kills Jesse and replaces him in the cycle of western mythology, becoming another casualty of the American drive to self-mythologize.  If Robert Ford is funny, he is funny in a Joe Pesci, “How am I fucking funny?” kind of way.  You can make fun of him all you want, but he may just put a bullet in your skull when you’re not looking.

A great deal of the film expends energy rooting through causes.  Ford may shoot you for laughing at him; Jesse James may shoot you because he thinks you betrayed him.  Or maybe it’s not that simple.  Motivations for murder range from bitterness over defeat in the Civil War, a political bounty for the head of a notorious outlaw, jealousy and family honor, and simple fear for your life.  One of the film’s most brilliant macguffins is an old member of the James gang who plans to turn Jesse in for reward money.  We never even get to meet this traitor, but his scheme drives forward most of the plot.  Or does it?  None of this is resolved, and between the mythopoeic voiceover to rare, reflective moments of characters’ self-disclosure, the film’s obsession with finding meaning in every gesture and tableaux is all the more haunting because nobody can know anything except what is on screen, and we are constantly aware of its presentation between the storybook framing devices, non-flashbacks filtered through a gauzy haze and lent speculation by a chillingly sympathetic narrator, and the interpretive vision of writer/director Andrew Dominik.

Dominik is wise enough to know that the process of mythologization is more fascinating than legends themselves — at least, as long as the people on whom the legends are based have tread the earth recently enough that their likenesses have been preserved in photographs, eyewitness accounts, and oral history.  His first film, Chopper, also preserved the “true” story of a self-mythologizing (that is, self-aggrandizing, bald-faced lying) criminal, without the lyricism and insight of Robert Ford.  Perhaps what Chopper really needed was a Robert Ford of its own; Chopper himself is a bit more like Ford than Jesse James, but he needed an outside perspective, one just as willing to view him as larger than life, as more than a man, but as something more personal, intimate, more pathetic, perhaps, more frightening… Robert Ford so desperately lacks his own identity that writing himself into one of his dime novels as a bit player, a cartoonish villain, a coward, a paper-thin plot device, was preferable to the way he perceived himself, and the way he was perceived by his friends and family.  Recognizing the potential of a man to become a legend is a gift in itself; it is how agents and managers and political advisors make a living.  Maybe, had Ford been born in the middle of the 20th century, he could have successfully opened a talent agency.  In the 19th, he was mangy pet, but he loved and hated his master.

Practical joker Brad often wondered by own whoopee cushion prank failed to amuse him.

Tapping into the human tendency to venerate those who, for whatever reason, rise above the rest of us, also taps into the mesmerizing question of why legends are created.  This isn’t the same thing as investigating the man behind the myth.  We’re not really interested in him.  We want to see why we’re so fascinated by the legend.  What we don’t understand — often until it’s too late — is that, one way or another, the legend kills the man.

Either the essence of the man is swept aside by the heraldry of myth, or the man is killed outright.  People love martyrs and so-called blazes of glory.  Regardless of the factual accuracy of these phenomena, they are what imprints most deeply on the popular consciousness.  When we watch a movie about heroes, villains, outlaws, and lawmen, what compels us isn’t just the portraiture, the iconography, but how deeply the film exhumes the psychological roots of the legend.  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford assumes our familiarity with its subjects in its very title; it’s not a film about them. It’s a film about how they’re perceived, and how they perceive each other.  In the final frames, we finally realize just how integral our own experience of the film has been filtered and framed, and just how much we’ve been encouraged to care about and empathize with these people simply because they already existed in our popular consciousness.  We miss them, even though we haven’t even gotten to know the real them.

Strangely, these characters are compelling because they don’t even understand what they do.  There’s so much they want to understand — themselves, each other, the world they live in — but they can’t, yet they are mythologized anyway.  This process is magical.  It’s distinctly “American,” but like any great film about the way we were, it depicts the way we are: our desires and fears, our great tragedies, so many of which are everyday, small, personal, and thoroughly mysterious.  Sure, it’s a western.  A western where everyone gets shot in the back, where the titular outlaw beats a defenseless child, where murderers are doting husbands and fathers.  Incongruities are the consistencies of life and legend alike.  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford gives an assassin his due, an outlaw a legendary send-off, and the viewers a modern myth equal to the task of illustrating a country at a crossroads, where the violence and avarice of the past meet the desperation for fame at any cost (and its unsatisfactory justifications).  Assassins and outlaws they may be, but James and Ford were American — not so far from us.  The question is, where does the truth end and the legend begin, and how tragic will the ending be?

Edited by Tracy McCusker.

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