There are certain defining characters and incidents in the history of the American West that generated a popular mythology during the 19th century and to which Hollywood has regularly returned to re-examine them in the light of changing social and political attitudes. The greatest of these concern the Earp brothers and the gunfight at the OK Corral in Arizona, Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War in New Mexico, and the escapades of the James brothers in Kansas and Missouri, all of them the subject of major movies in every decade since the late Thirties.
It's noteworthy that the latest addition to the James legend, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (based closely on Ron Hansen's novel), should be directed by Andrew Dominik with music by Nick Cave, both from Australia, a country famous for making heroes out of outlaws.
The cinematic image of Jesse was first established in Henry King's 1939 Jesse James, where Tyrone Power's glamorous outlaw is a Robin Hood figure, a creation of post-Civil War injustice and, by implication, of the Great Depression. The following year, in Fritz Lang's The Return of Frank James, his equally heroic and misunderstood elder brother was played by Henry Fonda, between impersonating the future President in Young Mr Lincoln and the honest, persecuted Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. In the mid-Fifties, Nicholas Ray's The True Story of Jesse James, a movie originally planned with James Dean in mind, presented Jesse as a mixed-up rebel without a cause.
Philip Kaufman's 1972 The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid captured the antiheroic zeitgeist by having Robert Duvall play Jesse as a psychotic religious fanatic in a world of random violence and capitalist cynicism. In the next James gang saga, Walter Hill's The Long Riders (the first western shown in competition at Cannes), crime was seen Godfather-style as a way of life with the outlaws participating in community activities when not robbing banks and trains.
The next film touching on this particular legend was Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil of 1999, which dealt with Southern guerrilla bands, most famously Quantrill's private army, west of the Mississippi, engaged in a vicious sideshow to the Civil War. They were the preparatory school for the idealistic innocents, farm boys, preachers' sons, opportunists and psychopaths who spawned the postwar crime wave led by the James brothers.
If Lee's film can be seen as a prologue to the story of the James gang, The Assassination of Jesse James can be viewed as its complement, an epilogue to the saga. It's a long, quiet, meditative work that largely takes place over a period of about eight months, beginning in 1881 with the 38-year-old Frank James (Sam Shepard) and his 34-year-old brother Jesse (Brad Pitt) meeting the 19-year-old Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) and his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), all of them the sons of rural preachers. Their conduct is stiffly formal, their vocabularies and cadences influenced like those around them by the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. The gang's great days concluded in 1876 with the debacle of the bank raid in Northfield, Minnesota, which resulted in the break-up of the James-Younger gang and drove Frank and Jesse into permanent hiding, the latter living with his wife and small children under a pseudonym.
After that, they did occasional jobs and are currently planning a small train robbery with a pick-up team of inexperienced, unreliable, trigger-happy country boys, including Jesse's future assassin, the hero-worshipping Bob Ford.
This is a typical theme of American crime movies: ageing men once proud of their professionalism, now forced to work and ride with inferior companions. James is a sick man, mentally and physically burnt out by his thirties. Like his brother, he's only living off, and for, the popular legend. They bring hope and pride to the local common folk and excitement to those on the tame Eastern Seaboard who read dime novels relating their adventures. 'In Europe, there are only two Americans everyone knows - Mark Twain and Jesse James,' says someone proudly of these two great Missourians. So this is a story of celebrity, of having a public persona that competes with one's real identity.
In addition to hero worship and celebrity, the movie is about the complex relationship between assassin and victim and we think of the killers of Lincoln, Trotsky, Gandhi and even John Lennon. Casey Affleck subtly traces the way Bob Ford both identifies himself with Jesse and develops a bizarre hatred for him, until eventually they're unconsciously involved in a form of suicide pact. We sense Jesse's death wish in the way he tracks down his suspected betrayers, in bizarre gestures like firing his revolver at the frozen river on which he stands and in the pristine pistol he gives Ford shortly before his death.
The movie does not end with Jesse's assassination, but with the following decade in which Ford himself becomes a puzzled, guilt-ridden celebrity and, like Lee Harvey Oswald, the target for another self-justifying, publicity-seeking assassin.
This is a subtle, perceptive, ruminative film, with little violent action and a deal of eloquent talk. The acting is understated, undemonstrative and the striking images, the work of the fine British cinematographer Roger Deakins, are cold, dark and bleak. Among the many incidental delights is the brief appearance of James Carville, the 'Ragin' Cajun' who managed Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, as the vindictive governor of Missouri. I wish the film-makers had mentioned that a couple of weeks after Jesse's death in St Joseph, Missouri, the celebrities' celebrity Oscar Wilde appeared on 18 April 1882 at the town's Tootle's Opera House during his exhausting coast-to-coast lecture tour. He wrote from there about the looting of Jesse's effects by souvenir hunters, remarking that Americans 'always take their heroes from the criminal element'.