Military Movies - Military Times

A timeless lesson: 'James' explores early celebrity fascination and pitfalls of fame

In “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” both men figure as prominently as you might expect.

But for writer-director Andrew Dominik, adapting Ron Hansen’s 1983 novel, the lives of his titular characters are hardly the point; they’re merely a means to explore the fickle nature of fame — how it so often touches people who would just as soon shun it, while forever eluding others who pant after it with every breath.

The film portrays James as America’s first true “celebrity” in anything close to the modern sense of the word. As such, it’s only fitting that the role is filled by Brad Pitt.

Flashing James’s strange mix of generous bonhomie and murderous rage, Pitt lets his eyes go wide and flat with deadly portent whenever he wants to put the fear into someone, which is about every three minutes or so.

Equally sublime is Casey Affleck, in what could be his breakout role, as Bob Ford, the 19-year-old sycophantic weasel whose obsession with all things Jesse borders on the homoerotic.

Moving in odd, jangly motions, with lazy eyes and slack jaw, grinning duplicitously at inappropriate moments, Affleck’s Ford is every bit the obsessed stalker-groupie.

The film opens in September 1881, a mere seven months before James’s death, with a recounting of the last train robbery pulled off by his gang in its 14year rampage — a thrilling sequence that introduces the full measure of his hair-trigger temper.

Shortly after, older brother Frank, getting on in years and seeing that the life they’ve known is heading for a really bad end, quits and heads east. But Jesse, sucked almost dry at age 34 by the weight of his own legend, goes on — sometimes under the alias Thomas Howard — with the remnants of the gang.

They include Bob and his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), Jesse’s cousin Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner) and ladies’ man Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider).

The others can’t see why the solitary, enigmatic Jesse is so tolerant of Bob. Even Jesse doesn’t seem to fully understand it. “Do you wanna be like me, or do you wanna be me?” he drawls menacingly to Bob in one scene.

But it’s clear that the little bootlicker, who owns copies of every pulp novel written about his idol, feeds James’s vanity. And so this weirdly symbiotic relationship limps to its well-known end a mere seven months later, in April 1882, with Bob forever tagged as “the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard.”

Here, in its final 20 minutes, the movie hits its most poignant notes as it skims the final decade of Bob’s life, spent in pursuit of adulation that would never come.

“I thought they’d applaud,” he says of the masses — failing to reckon with his countrymen’s nascent fondness for sociopathic, authority-defying bad-boy types.

That the film takes 2 hours to reach those final 20 minutes will test the patience and stamina of many viewers. It hardly needs to be so long; while it’s gorgeously photographed and Dominik goes to extraordinary lengths to nail the period details, there are too many self-indulgent shots of tall grass waving in the breeze and low clouds skimming the sky.

And some plot threads are just unnecessary. A 15-minute scene in which Hite and Liddil visit Hite’s elderly father and his hot young wife (Kailin See), who’s itching for more than the old man can give her, never would have been missed had it been cut.

Still, the film’s gritty palette, thunderclaps of violence and incisive riffs on the ways that myth and reality entwine in the mists of history will hook anyone who has ever been captivated by tales of the Old West. Ë

Rated R for graphic violence, language.

Late plugs

I recently caught up with two movies that have been out for a few weeks and are well worth catching before they leave the octoplex.

In “Eastern Promises,” Viggo Mortensen dives so deeply into the role of a London-based Russian mafia thug that he’s unrecognizable. The film features one of the greatest hand-to-hand fight scenes ever and a great plot twist near the end that you’ll never see coming.

Tommy Lee Jones shoots out the lights in “In the Valley of Elah” as a retired military policeman trying to unravel the murder of his soldier son, just back from a tour in Iraq. It’s packed with grace, subtlety and harrowing power, and the final scene lets loose a pure primal scream about the war — while barely rising above a whisper.

Both films are rated R. Both rate a solid 3½ stars.