The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Before Blonde, director Andrew Dominik made one of the best films of Brad Pitt’s career

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford can be interpreted in many ways, all of them valid. To some, it could be a psychological duel between two adversaries; to others, it could be a homoerotic love story about a couple of men whose lives are inextricably linked together. But more than anything else, the film is a melancholic examination of mortality.

Brad Pitt plays the legendary outlaw, and Casey Affleck plays the man who would eventually put a bullet in his back. But Robert Ford — called Bob throughout the film — never wanted to murder Jesse James. To him, Jesse was a childhood hero. A large chunk of the film is told from Bob’s perspective, as he schemes to ingratiate himself into the Jesse James gang, giddy at the thought of being in the same room as his idol, and prone to boasting when he’s asked to perform tasks — however menial they may be — by the legend himself. Bob is a slippery character, the sort of person who has to repeat himself because of his tendency to mumble on the first attempt. He lingers and fidgets, and has the unique ability to make any situation uncomfortable with his neediness and nervous energy.

We’re told that as a child, Bob used to be obsessed with Jesse. He still has a stash of old dime novels of Jesse’s escapades hidden under his bed. When he summons the courage to tell him this, Jesse scoffs and says that the stories were all lies. Of course, Bob concedes, too self-conscious to allow himself to appear gullible. He is a Stan in the true sense of the word, just as Eminem described. In a remarkable dinner scene later in the film, Bob lists all the ways that he thinks they’re similar. He talks about their height, their families, their appearance. It’s all superficial stuff; he doesn’t mention anything about their personalities, their psychology, their ideology.

Jesse, in the film, isn’t someone we’re necessarily meant to empathise with, although Dominik makes an effort to humanise him. He’s capable of great cruelty, and is more than aware of his celebrity status. How he uses Bob to facilitate his morbid ambitions is fascinating. In a way, he orchestrates the terms of his own death. Convinced that the end is near, Jesse essentially grooms Bob to kill him — it’s almost like the Dumbledore and Snape situation — just to preserve his legend. He believes he must die a death befitting a man like himself. And his plan worked.

Jesse achieved greater fame after his assassination, as the film’s soothing voiceover, hummed in the subjunctive tense by Hugh Ross, tells us. People lined up to get a look at his body, which was put on public display on a slab of ice. Photographs of the corpse were sold in sundries stores. Others paid money to live in rooms that he spent parts of his 34 years on Earth in; they named children after Jesse James. In subliminally ‘training’ the foolish Bob to kill him, he ensured that he would live on for eternity.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Ford is miracle of a movie that only Dominik could have made. The exacting filmmaker, who is known to speak pompously about his own work and really take his time on the edit table, referenced old photographs and magazine clips for the film’s unique visual style, pioneered by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins. Incidentally, many scenes in Blonde also resemble old Life magazine stills.

But as sweepingly old-fashioned as the movie was, it somehow captured the zeitgeist of the very particular period in recent history that it happened to be released in. This was when the first wave of reality television was sweeping the world, and making people like Paris Hilton, Snookie, Heidi Montag and Kim Kardashian household names. And to watch Bob behave like a hanger-on around Jesse — like Kim used to be with Paris — gave the film an entirely new, albeit unplanned, meaning. In the years to come, audiences will discover new sides to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, as it examined and reexamined, and rightfully counted among the best films of the new millennium.