There's a different riddle in The Assassination of Jesse James, staring into a florid sunset, slashes of red cutting across the sky. Dressed in near-all black, the question mark known as Jesse James stands away from the camera, knee-deep in a golden, grassy field stirred by the wind or perhaps just an off-screen mechanical fan.
It's a striking, pleasing image, whatever the case, pretty as a picture postcard, a vision of man and nature that brings to mind Thoreau at Walden Pond or more precisely Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven. James is also facing West, of course, toward the last frontier, home to cowboys and Indians and prospectors of all types, including, soon enough, those who will wield movie cameras, not six-shooters.
If he had lived, James might have saddled up for the movies, and, indeed, his own son played him in the 1921 film Jesse James Under the Black Flag. When The Assassination opens in September 1881, shortly before his final train robbery and seven months before his death, James was already a star of sorts, a living if fast-aging legend, a favorite newspaper subject, a government target and the featured attraction in hundreds of dime novels with titles like The James Boys and the Vigilantes. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.
It's a curious performance, at once central and indistinct, but then, so too is the character. Based on the novel of the same title by Ron Hansen, the film introduces James at the beginning of his end. Hunkered down in some woods, surrounded by darkly dressed men and leafless birch trees, and framed by Roger Deakins's impeccable, stark, high-contrast cinematography, he looks a vision. This isn't just Jesse James - it's also Jim Morrison at the Whisky in 1966 with a dash of Laurence Olivier, a touch of Warren Beatty and more than a hint of Ralph Lauren. It's the beautiful bad man, knowing and doomed, awaiting his fate like some Greco-Hollywood hero, rather than the psychotic racist of historical record.
The movies have their truths, which rarely align with those of history. Taken on its own narrow, heavily aestheticized and poetic-realist terms, then, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford works. The cinematography may speak to Dominik's yearning for meaning and importance more than it does of his outlaw, but the visuals often dazzle and enthrall. (The images that approximate the blurred distortions characteristic of pinhole photography are especially striking.) They also distract and, after a while, help weigh down the film, which sinks under the heaviness of images so painstakingly art directed, so fetishistically lighted and adorned, that there isn't a drop of life left in them. Instead of daguerreotype,. Dominik works in stone.
The question of whether the world or cinema needs another monument to an American gangster, a thug who lived by the gun and repeatedly killed in cold blood, remains unanswered by the film and its makers. And perhaps that isn't a question worth asking. This is, after all, meant to be an evening's entertainment, and its burdens should remain modest even if its goals are not. Its revelations, aside from Affleck's performance, which manages to make the character seem dumb and the actor wily and smart, are nonexistent. The true story of Jesse James, despite all the dime novels and B movies, remains untold, perhaps because in its savagery it really is as American as apple pie and, as such, unspeakably hard to tell.
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