The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

Even while he was alive, the line between fact and fiction in Jesse James' life was unclear. And when characters called 'Jesse James' started to appear in the movies (mere decades after his death in 1882), his story and his legend still went hand in hand.

Andrew Dominik's film looks at the creation of a legend, but it adopts a modern sensibility. It also tells more of Robert Ford's story than in previous films, which have focussed directly on Jesse. In 1957's The True Story of Jesse James for example, Ford only really entered the narrative to provide the story with its infamous full stop.

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is a film as involved as its marvellously comprehensive title. Thanks to a strong performance from Brad Pitt and an outstanding one from Casey Affleck, the sumptuous Missouri landscapes shot by veteran cinematographer Roger Deakins (the Coen's collaborator on Fargo and No Country For Old Men), and a beautiful score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, it succeeds.

The relationship between Jesse James and Robert Ford is a nuanced one here. Pitt's mannerisms (so exaggerated in Twelve Monkeysand inescapable in much of his output) are restrained yet appropriate. Affleck too has found a perfect outlet for his own style, creating a remarkable portrait of Ford, who is by turns sweet and creepy.

The film has a fairly loose structure. It starts with the James brothers, who've lost the rest of the James-Younger gang to bullets and arrests, as they recruit a ragtag bunch for a train robbery. Among them is 19-year-old Robert Ford with his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell). Frank James (Sam Shepherd) is nonplussed by the young Robert's assertions of his own courage, but Jesse is friendlier.

The infamous outlaw is 34, feeling old, suffering from insomnia and unhealed injuries, and enjoys the attentions of Ford, who's basically just a Jesse fanboy. Jesse, who loses his trust in everybody bar his dutiful wife Zee (Mary-Louise Parker), doesn't exactly let his guard down to Robert, but he can't resist the idolisation he receives from the lad.

As Jesse traverses winter-bound Missouri, visiting sometime comrades who may or may not be scheming to sell him out to the authorities, Robert buys himself a new suit and practises trying to be the tough outlaw. "Can't figure it out: you want to be like me, or you want to be me" Jesse asks his adoring would-be protégé. He lets the Ford brothers get close though, taking them on as house-guests while he plans, or pretends to plan, another job.

Dominik's film ambles across this physical and psychological landscape at a pace that's more than just leisurely (it's very Terrence Malick circa Days Of Heaven), taking in as much rumination as it does actual action. The coverage of Jesse's celebrity, and how it shaped Robert with his youthful hunger for the "yarns and newspaper stories", is fascinating, anchored by a narration (delivered by Hugh Ross) that sounds authoritative, omniscient, yet may be as unreliable as the legends themselves.

Unlike earlier films that dealt with this subject, Andrew Dominik introduces a modern tone - appropriate for an age when we eagerly idolise the most dubious role models and turn nobodies into celebrities.