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

Premise: On one of his last heists, Jesse James (Brad Pitt) accepts Charley Ford’s (Sam Rockwell) younger brother Bob (Casey Affleck) into his gang, despite the objections of Jesse’s older brother, Frank (Sam Shepard). Winter falls and sends the gang into hibernation, where Bob’s sycophantic obsession with Jesse festers into something more sinister.

I’m just going to go come out and say it: this movie’s not for everyone. It’s slow and atmospheric, full of forbidding landscapes and weighty narration. It’s a little like being caught in dream conception of the famous outlaw and discovering it’s a nightmare from which you can’t wake up. You can only ride it out.

It’s not so much a movie as it is a wrestling match between Pitt’s Jesse and Affleck’s Bob. Every time you think you have a handle on which of the two, if anyone, is the coward, the movie shifts focus yet again to pick up another facet of the story, another part of their twin personae.

Invoking Terrence Malik on his best day, director Andrew Dominik, working from his own screen adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel, has created a world that’s not so much murky as it is relentlessly grey. Roger Deakins’ cinematography captures the stark, cold winter landscapes and the dull, overcast days that follow the snow to great effect. The world around these men is a reflection of the internal, seemingly empty with great dark forests at the edges. Combined with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ circular and moody score, the movie manages to take the oppressiveness that comes with a long, cold winter and apply it to the character’s psyches.

There’s a lot of great supporting work from the aforementioned Shepard and Rockwell, as well as Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, and the thoroughly creepy Paul Schneider, but this is really the Pitt-Affleck show. Pitt has grown from the pretty boy we first met into a far different man. The first shots we see of Jesse, standing alone in a wheat field, his face looks weathered, haunted, and handsome in way it never has before. He’s both snake and snake charmer, coiling around his prey to choke the hero worship out of Bob, only to demand it back again. It’s a difficult and nuanced performance, sad and strange, one that Pitt handles with aplomb.

He’s perfectly matched in the slight, pale Affleck. From his hunched shoulders to his wheezing laugh to his shortness of breath is almost every situation, Affleck is exactly what you would expect a coward who shot his boss in the back to be without ever actually being a coward. Affleck’s Bob is perfectly aware of his actions but detached from their consequences. He’s too young to see the bigger picture, and it is in that lack of experience that Affleck soars. It’s a wonder that he can draw me in with his maturity in other roles and still make me feel sympathy for the inevitably of his immaturity here.

Meditative and heavy, aided by Hugh Ross’s insightful narration, the slow pacing in this movie will probably put a lot of people off (like, say, those that left the theatre when we were there). If you stop fighting it, though, it will draw you into its haunting embrace. A-