Does The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford strike you as an overly long title with an unnecessary amount of exposition? It's a perfect representation of the film, a neo-Western that drifts like a tumbleweed across nearly three hours of terse conversation, sprawling landscapes and extraneous narration. Based on the novel by Ron Hansen, The Assassination is a kind of Passion Play for notorious murderer and bank robber Jesse James, showing his suffering, death, and finally, the resurrection of his legend. The role of Judas is played by Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), a young man whose lifelong worship of James — facilitated by hyperbolic dime store novels — leads him into the man's inner circle. The years have not been kind to Jesse James, whose famed charisma and derring-do have degenerated into paranoia, distrust and unprompted acts of horrifying violence. It would actually be difficult to understand James' appeal, were he not played by Brad Pitt, whose charisma works in inverse proportion to his characters' mental stability. Playing the totally deranged (as in Fight Club or 12 Monkeys), Pitt is mesmerizing; whenever he's onscreen as Jesse, one gets the palpable sense that someone is about to get shot.
And so goes the film: Jesse starts picking off every man he knows lest they kill him first, Robert tags along trying to Eve Harrington him, then Robert turns, Jesse dies, and both men are granted a place in the history books. Affleck's sly performance is surprisingly well-matched to Pitt's, but the power of their scenes is diffused by the endless supporting cast and the wearying narrator, who's fond of saying things like "The men played cards" while the men onscreen play cards. By the time the key murder happens, we've been waiting two hours and twenty minutes. The film's remaining twenty minutes are a condensed A&E biography of Ford's post-murder fame, which soon turned to notoriety and led to his own assassination.
In an age when we've seen multiple legends murdered by obsessive fans, the story of Robert Ford might have had some resonance. But instead of a riveting psychological showdown between the title characters, director Andrew Dominik gives us a long, meandering stroll, stopping only briefly to ponder the connection between fame, notoriety and madness. The film's (often beautiful) visual style reminded me of Andrew Wyeth paintings, which seems fitting — his landscapes usually contain a few resonant details, and a lot of empty space. — Gwynne Watkins