Don’t reveal if Jesse gets killed, or who by!

Don’t reveal if Jesse gets killed, or who by!

Few things have brought me more trouble with readers than my recent assertion that Capt. Renault of “Casablanca” plays for both teams in the sport of sex. I think I’ll get less argument if I stick to the homosexual undercurrents of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

Jesse (Brad Pitt) is no doubt not gay, but the Coward (Casey Affleck) is so powerfully drawn to him that hero worship shades into lust. With sex between them out of the question, the relationship becomes a strangely erotic pas de deux toward death; it’s clear to both of them (and anyone who reads titles) what has to happen at the end, and they move toward it like sleepwalkers.

The movie has the freedom and scope of classic Western epics. Like “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “Days of Heaven,” it was photographed on western Canadian locations where there are so few people, they create a vacuum that sucks in legends. Jesse James is such a man: a brutal killer and devoted father and husband, celebrated in dime novels that Robert Ford memorizes. If Ford is a coward, then what was James, who led his efficient gang on stagecoach and bank robberies in which unarmed men and women were killed? But he did it with style, you see, and Ford is only a callow squirt.

The story begins in 1881 when Jesse’s legend has entered folklore and the James Gang is down to its last robbery. The members are Jesse’s older brother Frank (Sam Shepard), Charley Ford (Sam Rockwell), brother of the Coward; cousin Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner), and outlaw Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider). Robert Ford comes along at 19 begging to be let in; his devotion is so abject that at one point Jesse asks him: “Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?”

The Coward is a star-struck stalker, and all the gang can see it. Why does Jesse put up with him? Is there a buried message that James, having become one of America’s first celebrity royals, realizes that Robert is the price he has to pay? After their last train job, Frank has had enough and heads out. Jesse goes home to his wife (Mary-Louise Parker) and children, and for some reason invites Robert to visit.

There are the usual lyrical scenes of Jesse playing with his kids and loving his wife; all the time they’re together, though, he and the Coward have something lethal going on between them. If Robert can’t be his hero’s lover, what could be more intimate than killing him?

One quiet parlor day in Jesse’s home Robert knows Jesse knows we know it’s time. Ford doesn’t so much shoot him in the back as have the back presented to him for that purpose. If he hadn’t pulled that trigger at that moment I think both of them would have felt they’d missed an appointment. Does Jesse want to die? I think he’s fascinated by the idea, and flies too close to the flame.

The film was directed and written by Andrew Dominik, which is based on the book of Ron Hansen. This is his second film, it has much in common with his first film “Chopper” (2001). The story was about a famous criminal in Australia’s history who only got stabbed by his best friend but ignored it and talked for awhile then looked down at the blood pouring from him as if disappointed in the other guy. Both Chopper Read and Jesse James were brutal killers, both putting themselves at risk masochistically.

Most of “Chopper” was shot inside prison walls by Dominik, but he opens up his camera to the far horizons this time showing how small a man can feel unless he does something big enough for people to know who he is. Cinematography done by Roger Deakins who shows us the modern west needing hard unforgiving men against its landscape also in No Country For Old Men(the Coen Brothers movie coming out soon).

Brad Pitt looks like he’s been embodying Jesse James mythic stature all his life; Casey Affleck plays the kid like Mark David Chapman, a nobody killing the one he loves. The gang members are like sidemen for Elvis, standing by subserviently keeping beat all except Frank played by Sam Shepard as the insider that gets it.

There are certain things about men horses and horizons that just belong on a wide screen. We see that here. The Western has mostly been hibernating since the 70’s but now I can feel it stirring back to life again. We have a program on my web site that registers most read reviews and for September “3:10 to Yuma” was not only number one but almost double its closest competition which included such titles as “Eastern Promises,” “Shoot ‘me up,” or “The Brave One.”

Yes it is long 160 minutes, there’s a feeling that an epic must have duration to have importance. The time reaching ahead of us must be as generous as the landscape unfolding before us. On this canvas Dominik paints his hero at a time when most men were so powerless they envied Jesse James even for imposing his will on such as they.

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