When the movie begins, the Northfield robbery that led to the end of the original James gang has already happened. As a kind of last hurrah, Jesse James (Brad Pitt) and his brother Frank (Sam Shepard) hire a new gang to pull off a train robbery. The group includes Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), a man who Frank admits gives him “the willies,” and who from the very beginning is desperate to prove his mettle, to show that he’s reliable and worth keeping in the gang permanently.
After the success of the robbery, Frank leaves the gang and Jesse becomes increasingly paranoid about the other members, convinced that at any moment one of them will turn him over to the authorities for the sizeable reward on his head. Most of the movie is about the deterioration of the gang and the downswing of James’s career, including his eventual death at the hands of Ford. That’s not a spoiler. It’s in the title.
The acting is superb all around: Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, Jeremy Renner, Paul Schneider; and Garrett Dillahunt (who you may know from Fox’s Raising Hope or as Deputy Wendell from No Country for Old Men) is outstanding in the minor role of Ed Miller. He plays this totally dim character flawlessly (I mean that as a high compliment, I swear). Playing sympathetically stupid this well has to be harder than it looks.
And Brad Pitt does a fine job; exactly what you’d expect from him. Nothing beyond what you’d see in his other major roles.
But Casey Affleck blows the whole thing out of the water. He nails it. He kills it (no pun intended). Robert Ford vacillates between creepy, desperate, funny, kind, brave, cowardly, simpering, decisive, indecisive—and Affleck transitions through each of these effortlessly. I sympathized with Ford, I felt sorry for him. Throughout the film he’s bullied, ignored, talked down to. But he’s also a total creeper. Affleck simultaneously inspires feelings of disgust and empathy.
Casey Affleck was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar in the Supporting Actor category, and lost both to Javier Bardem for his portrayal of Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. I love that movie, I love Javier, but honestly that would have been a toss-up for me.
While I'm crazy about the movie, I did have a few very minor quibbles with it. After the shooting, in the course of a single day the Ford brothers were indicted, found guilty, sentenced to death by hanging, and two hours later pardoned by Governor Crittendon (played by James Carville in the movie with sinister excellence). While this is largely considered to be the most historically accurate depiction of Jesse James on film, this part of the story is omitted. I think it would have been amazing to see Affleck’s portrayal of how Ford would have handled that kind of rollercoaster stress. Alas. It was 2 ½ hours long anyway, adding all that would have pushed it into Epic territory.
The music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is fantastic, but when Cave makes a cameo at the end of the film to sing “The Ballad of Jesse James” the song seemed a bit too modern even though it was apparently written shortly after James’s death. And while the cinematography is beautiful, some of the camera affects got annoying after a while.
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