The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)

As ever, a beautifully shot film by Roger Deakins.

Directed by Andrew Dominik
Written by Andrew Dominik, Roy Hanson (novel)
Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard


I've spoken before about twists, and about the spoiling of them.  It's not always easy to talk about a plot that takes a sudden and unexpected turn, without at least hinting about the change of direction.  On the other hand, do any of us really want to spoil a big twist in a film for anyone else?  Do we really want to give the ending away, do we really want to take away the joy of discovery?

It is with some relief, then, that I come to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  If ever a film was upfront about its intentions, this must be it.  There's no trickery in that title, there's no leading you down the wrong path.  Nor is it fundamentally incorrect, like Krakatoa East of Java.  Nor, for that matter, is it gently prodding you to the wrong conclusion, in the sense that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance wants you to believe that the fellow in question is James Stewart rather than John Wayne.  Nope, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford does exactly what it says, and never lets you forget it.  We've read the last page of the book, and now we're bound to watch the earlier pages being fitted into place.

In a sense, we're involved, we're voyeurs, we're caught in a story that we know will certainly end in death.  We know who's going to be killed, we know who's going to do the killing.  And this isn't a story like, say, Titanic, where we know the iceberg is coming but here's a girl and a boy making fools out of themselves to distract you for three and a half long, tortuous hours.  Nor is it Gandhi, a film that begins with the certainty of a shooting but never lets you think that the shooting is the be-all-and-end-all of the story; it's a conclusion that we have to reach, but there's so much more to see along the way.  No, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford isn't about anything else.  You're here to see the murder.  The title even tells you that it's not going to be a noble or heroic death.

However, the characters don't know this.  Hence the voyeurism; we know exactly what's coming, and how ugly it's going to be, but we're going to watch all concerned find out for themselves.  It's very appropriate that the film has us follow not the charismatic, legendary outlaw, but the coward of the title (a superb performance by the younger, and arguably more talented Affleck), his weakness, his guilt.  Jesse James is often distant, or part in shadow, or moving away from us - while we stay much closer to the antihero of the tale.  And that, ultimately, is where we belong; we can relate to the coward far more than we can relate to the outlaw.

Relating to the coward, following him voyeuristically, these are not easy subjects, and it would have been very easy for this film to fail, to become preachy and heartless.  Fortunately, it doesn't fail at all (although it could have been twenty minutes shorter without losing anything), thanks to a fine script and beautiful and inventive photography by the always wonderful Roger Deakins.  It's the elegance of the movie that allows us, nay makes us engage with Ford's weak and petty everyman.

Towards the end of the picture, Ford is asked why he did it:

Well, he was going to kill me.
So you were scared, and that's the only reason?
Yeah, and the reward money.

 Fear and avarice, in the end, are dreadfully human qualities, whether we want to admit to them or not.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Two men of the old west, one of the new.

Directed by John Ford
Written by James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck, Dorothy M. Johnson (novel)
Starring John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin



Look at it; it was once a wilderness, now it's a garden.

There are three genres in cinema that find their roots entirely and exclusively in American soil; the gangster movie, the musical, and the western.  Yet only one of the three seems lodged in a long-distant halcyon age of Hollywood:  the gangster genre is as much about Scorsese as it is about Jimmy Cagney, while musicals have had many distinct ages - the Busby Berkeley-dominated era in the early days of sound, the time of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the 50s and early 60s, the less relentlessly cheerful 70s pictures (such as Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret), more recent musicals like Chicago, Mamma Mia!, not to mention all those Disney animations.  Oh, and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.  Mustn't forget that.

And the western?  As a genre, it's tied inextricably to one period of time - from the mid-1930s to the beginning of the 1960s.  It's tied to one actor, John Wayne.  And it's tied to one director, the peerless John Ford.  Of course, there have been westerns since - and recently indeed, with the likes of Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma.  And certainly, Sergio Leone made a tremendous stab at a one-man revival of the genre, yet even his outstanding work in westerns reflects an outsider trying to reinvigorate a world that had died - like the westerns of the past decade, Leone's are a homage to the classic style, rather than a new direction.

The west changed, and the world changed.  The old ways, of big men with big guns and big horses shooting evil, shallow, one-dimensional Indians and/or bandits just weren't relevant any more.  It had been done, and done to death, in a time when the simplicity of an ever-victorious fight between the good ol' US of A and those who seek to stop them was what so much of the public was after; come the 60s, come a new generation with a new set of priorities and a new politics, that world had gone, and it took the western with it.  And come the 70s, the western makes a rare appearance as something antiheroic, something negative and bleak - take Robert Altman's masterful McCabe and Mrs Miller: it has no time for the proud gunslinger and good-hearted young lady, instead giving us a gambler and a prostitute, running a brothel.  The west is not heroic, the west is not the bold and upstanding and fearless foundation of America.  The west is unpleasant, rough, selfish, grubby.  The west is a place and a time to regret.  This is not the west of John Ford and John Wayne.

And yet, it is.  If you wanted to pin down the end of that era, it's here, the last western that Ford and Wayne made together.  It has all the building blocks of the genre - apart from Wayne as burly sharpshooter in love with The Girl, we've a violent and fearsome bandit (Marvin) and his goons, we've a local marshal who's too weak and drunk and gluttonous to do anything about it, we've a brave outsider (Stewart) riding in to transform the present and the future of the frontier town.  But the blocks aren't stacked the right way, the edifice is falling.  The outsider isn't a heroic frontiersman, he's not a cowboy or a sheriff or an outlaw-come-good.  He's a lawyer and sometime politician.  He can't shoot a gun straight to save his life.  When he finally decides that, as the noble hero, he should confront the bandit, he's wearing an apron.

Meanwhile, Wayne, big, strong John Wayne, seems only to slip further into the shadows.  Nothing stands more clearly for the death of the west than the isolation of his character - at first, the brave hero, the only man who really tries to defend his town, but after Stewart rides in, he finds himself gradually yet completely driven aside.  The gunslinger, the quick, strong, western icon, comes to mean so little in the face of a new world.  As law and order, literacy and politics seep into the life of the little town, the role of the old warrior is reduced to nothing more than a murderer hiding in the shadows.  The man of the old west is beaten; all respect him, but none look to him to lead them any longer.  Stewart, his books and his words, represents the future.  Wayne is isolated.  Wayne is the past.  And, ultimately, Wayne hands over the town - and the west - to Stewart to carry forward.

And, in the end, we have Stewart and The Girl riding across the prairie - not in a stagecoach, not on horseback, but in civilised comfort on the railroad.  The west they're leaving behind, she says, has transformed from wilderness into garden - and it's Stewart that's responsible, it's the encroachment of the world of laws and letters that planted the seeds, the seeds which now blossom outside the window of the carriage.

It was the civilising of the west which gave birth to Hollywood, and Hollywood which gave birth to the story, the legend of that vast, open land.  Eventually, the two had to let go of one another.  It's only right and fitting that it fell to Ford and Wayne to write the last word.