The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

It sounds like the name of a painting. Or possibly the name of the theatrical sketch in which Ford reenacted his inglorious deed several hundred times for the benefit of eager Easterners. It suggests a pivotal moment, frozen in time. And that's what it's about.

There are things you should know going in. This isn't an action-packed celebration of derring-do - not by a long chalk. In fact Andrew Dominick's movie concentrates exclusively on the tail end of Jesse James' career. We only see one robbery, and that occurs in the movie's first 15 minutes. There are shoot-outs later, but be aware: this is a long, slow mood piece of a movie (2 hours 40 minutes). It's funny, sort of, in a pokey, lopsided fashion, but mostly it's not.

People bump up against each other in the worst ways in this film, and everything comes out badly. I don't mean to put you off. Anyone with eyes and a modicum of patience can see this is an outstanding movie, as artful as anything to come out of Hollywood this year - and the bravest Western since; I don't know - Heaven's Gate?

Brad Pitt is Jesse James, and it's a superb performance. He's at the centre of everything, all eyes are on him: he's charismatic, volatile, charming, dangerous, and at the same time, often subdued, isolated, melancholy, unreadable. Pitt suggests how it is that men will ride with him into danger, yet will never be quite confident he won't lash out and leave them in the dust. There's a meanness mixed up with his largesse. Also a streak of insecurity; he's very much the younger brother to Sam Shepard's Frank James, smart enough to quit while the quitting's good. Jesse craves Frank's respect as other men crave his.

Pitt won the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival, yet even so, I think this is Casey Affleck's movie in the end. Robert Ford is the worm who turns. "People take me for a nincompoop," he admits early on, and they do. And they're right. He's an asinine young man with stars in his eyes who fancies himself a desperado.

What he needs is a kick in the pants. Instead he's ushered into Jesse's circle - the old James-Younger gang being mostly dead or jailed by this point, they're a sorry-looking raggle of deadbeats (they include Jeremy Renner, Chris Speers, Garret Dillahunt, Paul Schneider and Sam Rockwell as Bob's big brother Charlie). You couldn't say Bob is encouraged in his delusions - he's relentlessly insulted, patronized, exploited, and humiliated by the older men in the gang - but all the same, the pride and the humiliation get mixed up somehow and curdle into a poisonous, festering trigger-itch. Who is to say what makes Jesse James a great man, and Robert Ford a lowly stooge?

If there's any justice - we know there isn't - British cinematographer Roger Deakins must win the Oscar for his marvelous, evocative work here. That initial nocturnal train robbery unfolds as a series of breathtaking compositions in shifting planes of darkness and scarce shafts of light. Deakins evokes the West (geographically speaking, the "mid-West") principally as a grand, beautiful space, so large and empty it mocks the men who dare give trespass.

Deakins and Dominick remind us that this was the Victorian era. The industrial age was already coming around the corner. Their cue is undoubtedly Ron Hanssen's novel, which also furnishes Dominick with a richly poetic voice over narration, used here as freely and effectively as in Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Lars Von Trier's Dogville.

Other touchstones: Terrence Malick's Days Of Heaven, certainly. Dominick's own previous film, Chopper. Perhaps, The Godfather II in the sense that both explore paranoia and betrayal.

In the end this is a remarkable one-off. Apparently the studio has been sitting on it for over a year, and you have to sympathise. I don't know how you sell a picture like this, or whether there is a significant audience for it. But I strongly suspect in years to come we'll look back on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford as an extraordinary anomaly, a masterpiece that runs entirely against the prevailing fashions in American movie-making but which cut outlast them all.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com