5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Andrew Dominik, 2007.
US/AUS

The “noughties” belonged to one genre for this viewer, and that genre was the Neo-Western. Inspired by the likes of Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales and John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock, an influx of post-modern, ultra realistic films set in various outbacks, off-roads and unbeaten tracks saw the light of day in the 2000’s. Tommy Lee Jones’ Guillermo Arriaga-scripted The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada arguably kicked off a sub-genre that culminated success wise three years later with the Jones-starring, Coen Brothers-directed No Country For Old Men, when that film took the big prizes at the 2007 Academy Awards. In between we had John Hillcoat’s outstanding The Proposition, the lauded HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and the Edward Norton vehicle Down in the Valley. Mainstream Hollywood even attempted to join in with the dire Ghost Rider. Anyway, I digress, the best of this (wild) bunch is Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, an intrinsically powerful and exhaustingly charted exploration of the concept of celebrity and obsession.

Brad Pitt provides a performance that pushes even his turn in Fight Club to one side, as the laconic yet brutal outlaw. It’s perhaps a testament to Pitt’s qualities as a screen presence, and in keeping with the films subtext that he is quite clearly the star of the piece, in spite of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford being the story of Casey Affleck’s Robert Ford. The film opens with Ford at the centre, and closes with his death, with James being little more than a Kurtz style mythical figure, sweeping in and out of the film, dictating the tone and mood of the picture as he passes through.