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Jesse James, myth-making and pop culture
10 septiembre 2011
In the 2007 movie, The Assassination of Jesse James, we get to see a nascent American pop culture in a collision between its pop star (James) and a displaced fan (Ford), in an episode eerily similar to the fatal collision of John Lennon and Mark David Chapman. The difference, aside from the century between events, is that, for a while anyway, Ford was touted as a hero while Chapman was villainized. Both murdered men were flawed pop icons of their day, killed by an obsessed fan.
The film is set in a time when the American public first became fascinated with - and eventually glorified - its most notorious criminals, transforming their image from armed thug to pop idol.
The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford - a line inspired by a 19th century folk song - is a dark, complex, psychologically dense movie about the final year of James' life, when Ford was a member of his gang. It trails off over the next 30 minutes with a look at Ford's life after the shooting, as the killer descends into an anguished period where he strives for, but fails to receive, the glory he thinks he deserves for his action.
It's not a movie western in any traditional sense of the word.* There are no good guy-bad guy confrontations. In fact, there are no "good guys" at all. It's more of a psychological portrait set in the late-19th century rural America. It's based on a 1983 novel by Ron Hansen, which dramatized the relationship between the men, but was not necessarily historically accurate. The film is thin on action but groans under the density of character. Both James and Ford are portrayed in almost excruciating depth over the 160 minutes of the film. There is very little action to speed the film's momentum towards the inevitable murders.
James was mythologized as the modern day Robin Hood even in the penny-dreadful publications of his time. But we never see him giving away his money or even interacting with the poor. By the time of the story, James is at the end of his career, so any publically-spirited actions may be behind him, but his actions in the film don't give credence to the myth. In fact, we never really see James deal with money at all, even after the one train robbery portrayed in the film. Money seems to hold no passion for him - the violence, however, does.
Instead we see him as a thug: vicious, suspicious to the point of paranoia, and unpredictably violent. His descent to become a psychopathic killer leaves us little room for sympathy, barely mitigated by the scenes of him and his family; playing with his children, a loving wife and a comfortable home. Brad Pitt plays James well as a brooding, mercurial and volatile character: well within Pitt's range. Pitt doesn't overreach, but you wish he had. James seems one-dimensional through most of the movie and we yearn for some Janus-faced moment to surprise and intrigue us.
Ford - Casey Affleck - is a brilliant portrait, on the other hand. Affleck plays Ford as an eager-to-please neophyte into James' world, bumbling, anxious, nervous but driven by a need to carve some place in history for himself. His ambition to succeed eventually drives him to kill James. It may be Affleck's best role of his career to date.
The first thought in watching the film with its portrayal of the Wild West at the end of its era, was that it was people by village idiots or simpletons. The characters in the gang and most of the supporting cast are all portrayed as dim, coarse, loud, stupid, aggressive, unwashed and uneducated. There is no John Wayne or Audie Murphy here, no sharp dialogue with traded witticisms, no philosophizing cowboys. They are an entirely unsympathetic lot and their demise is hardly noted when it happens. The only one who seems to have an IQ over 60 is James, and although Ford is often described as intelligent in the film, he shows more cunning than wisdom or learning. The only sense that his brighter than the rest is when his cache of pocket books is exposed and we realize he can read, which isn't true of all the rest.
The deterioration of the relationship between James and his men is no surprise to the viewers - what is more surprising is how they managed to get along at all and coordinate any robberies. That may in great part be due to the planning and control of Jesse's brother, Frank, a sour, angry man who has a brooding presence at the start of the film, but goes offstage early on and we never get to see his character properly fleshed out or his impact on the gang's cohesiveness explained. After Frank leaves, the gang seems less like a gang than a group of bumbling, insecure fools. Fools with guns, a dangerous mix.
The characters who should evoke sympathy - James' wife (Mary-Louise Parker) and two children - are cardboard cutouts, who fill a purpose in illustrating the other side of James' dualistic existence, but do so in a mechanical fashion that doesn't express much real warmth.The house they live in feels incomplete, a temporary abode - which may have been deliberate since James moved a lot, but it simply adds to the flimsiness of the family characters. James seems less like a husband and father and more like a guest in his own home.
The film is shot with a lot of brown, grey and black palettes - scenes of late-fall fields full of dead plants and forests of leafless trees are common. With the cloudy skies and shadowy woods of many scenes, it's supposed to create an oneiric quality, "reminiscent of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth" according to a comment on Wikipedia. That may have great artistic depth, but for the viewer, it is unrelentingly bleak and dreary and contributes to the feeling the film is overly long. The dreamlike qualities may have been deliberately meant to evoke the mythic aspect of the tale, but at times you long for some splashes of bright colour to relieve the monotony.
The last half hour of the film is dedicated to Ford's struggle to become a pop star himself, capitalizing on his fame - or infamy - as the killer of James, but eventually sinking into drink, depression and self-loathing. His egotistic grabbing at fame and fortune only continue to make him unsympathetic and it is only in the final scenes where he shares his inner thoughts with a nightclub singer (Zooey Deschanel) that Ford comes across as a fragile, all-too-human failure. But like James, his violent end is inevitable, too, and we seem to plod towards the conclusion that should have some much closer to the death of James.
While the film is too long, too bleak and too light on the action, it does have merit as an exploration of the distance between pop-culture identity and reality, a topic that has meaning today. Both James and Ford appear as very different from their popular images of the day. James is not a hero, Ford is not a villain - the truth is much more complex. But it's not a complexity overlaid with secrets or hidden meaning, more that layers of misunderstanding have built up over the tale like rust, occluding any truths that might be buried within. Director Andrew Domink has tried to expose the core under those layers, and in almost succeeds, but the film's length, its slowness and its one-sided characterizations hold it back. The one thing it did for me is make me want to read the novel to explore how well Hansen's vision was portrayed on the screen.
~~~~~
* Westerns have traditionally been relatively simple films that might be called modern morality plays. They are usually about basic confrontations between good and evil, with a hero who has to overcome the villain, usually treading along the path outlined by Joseph Campbell in his Hero With a Thousand Faces . While many are cookie-cutter products with predictable scripts, some are very entertaining and the comforting ending of good triumphing after adversity appeals to the sense of justice within most of us.
The film is set in a time when the American public first became fascinated with - and eventually glorified - its most notorious criminals, transforming their image from armed thug to pop idol.
The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford - a line inspired by a 19th century folk song - is a dark, complex, psychologically dense movie about the final year of James' life, when Ford was a member of his gang. It trails off over the next 30 minutes with a look at Ford's life after the shooting, as the killer descends into an anguished period where he strives for, but fails to receive, the glory he thinks he deserves for his action.
It's not a movie western in any traditional sense of the word.* There are no good guy-bad guy confrontations. In fact, there are no "good guys" at all. It's more of a psychological portrait set in the late-19th century rural America. It's based on a 1983 novel by Ron Hansen, which dramatized the relationship between the men, but was not necessarily historically accurate. The film is thin on action but groans under the density of character. Both James and Ford are portrayed in almost excruciating depth over the 160 minutes of the film. There is very little action to speed the film's momentum towards the inevitable murders.
James was mythologized as the modern day Robin Hood even in the penny-dreadful publications of his time. But we never see him giving away his money or even interacting with the poor. By the time of the story, James is at the end of his career, so any publically-spirited actions may be behind him, but his actions in the film don't give credence to the myth. In fact, we never really see James deal with money at all, even after the one train robbery portrayed in the film. Money seems to hold no passion for him - the violence, however, does.
Ford - Casey Affleck - is a brilliant portrait, on the other hand. Affleck plays Ford as an eager-to-please neophyte into James' world, bumbling, anxious, nervous but driven by a need to carve some place in history for himself. His ambition to succeed eventually drives him to kill James. It may be Affleck's best role of his career to date.
The first thought in watching the film with its portrayal of the Wild West at the end of its era, was that it was people by village idiots or simpletons. The characters in the gang and most of the supporting cast are all portrayed as dim, coarse, loud, stupid, aggressive, unwashed and uneducated. There is no John Wayne or Audie Murphy here, no sharp dialogue with traded witticisms, no philosophizing cowboys. They are an entirely unsympathetic lot and their demise is hardly noted when it happens. The only one who seems to have an IQ over 60 is James, and although Ford is often described as intelligent in the film, he shows more cunning than wisdom or learning. The only sense that his brighter than the rest is when his cache of pocket books is exposed and we realize he can read, which isn't true of all the rest.
The deterioration of the relationship between James and his men is no surprise to the viewers - what is more surprising is how they managed to get along at all and coordinate any robberies. That may in great part be due to the planning and control of Jesse's brother, Frank, a sour, angry man who has a brooding presence at the start of the film, but goes offstage early on and we never get to see his character properly fleshed out or his impact on the gang's cohesiveness explained. After Frank leaves, the gang seems less like a gang than a group of bumbling, insecure fools. Fools with guns, a dangerous mix.
The characters who should evoke sympathy - James' wife (Mary-Louise Parker) and two children - are cardboard cutouts, who fill a purpose in illustrating the other side of James' dualistic existence, but do so in a mechanical fashion that doesn't express much real warmth.The house they live in feels incomplete, a temporary abode - which may have been deliberate since James moved a lot, but it simply adds to the flimsiness of the family characters. James seems less like a husband and father and more like a guest in his own home.
The film is shot with a lot of brown, grey and black palettes - scenes of late-fall fields full of dead plants and forests of leafless trees are common. With the cloudy skies and shadowy woods of many scenes, it's supposed to create an oneiric quality, "reminiscent of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth" according to a comment on Wikipedia. That may have great artistic depth, but for the viewer, it is unrelentingly bleak and dreary and contributes to the feeling the film is overly long. The dreamlike qualities may have been deliberately meant to evoke the mythic aspect of the tale, but at times you long for some splashes of bright colour to relieve the monotony.
The last half hour of the film is dedicated to Ford's struggle to become a pop star himself, capitalizing on his fame - or infamy - as the killer of James, but eventually sinking into drink, depression and self-loathing. His egotistic grabbing at fame and fortune only continue to make him unsympathetic and it is only in the final scenes where he shares his inner thoughts with a nightclub singer (Zooey Deschanel) that Ford comes across as a fragile, all-too-human failure. But like James, his violent end is inevitable, too, and we seem to plod towards the conclusion that should have some much closer to the death of James.
While the film is too long, too bleak and too light on the action, it does have merit as an exploration of the distance between pop-culture identity and reality, a topic that has meaning today. Both James and Ford appear as very different from their popular images of the day. James is not a hero, Ford is not a villain - the truth is much more complex. But it's not a complexity overlaid with secrets or hidden meaning, more that layers of misunderstanding have built up over the tale like rust, occluding any truths that might be buried within. Director Andrew Domink has tried to expose the core under those layers, and in almost succeeds, but the film's length, its slowness and its one-sided characterizations hold it back. The one thing it did for me is make me want to read the novel to explore how well Hansen's vision was portrayed on the screen.
~~~~~
* Westerns have traditionally been relatively simple films that might be called modern morality plays. They are usually about basic confrontations between good and evil, with a hero who has to overcome the villain, usually treading along the path outlined by Joseph Campbell in his Hero With a Thousand Faces . While many are cookie-cutter products with predictable scripts, some are very entertaining and the comforting ending of good triumphing after adversity appeals to the sense of justice within most of us.
