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The first question you are likely to ask after watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is why Javier Bardem beat out Casey Affleck for Best Supporting Actor. Not to take anything away from Bardem’s performance in No Country for Old Men, but, well, come on! Bardem was asked to be menacing, which he did wonderfully, but that is all he was asked. Affleck shows more insight into Bob Ford in just one scene than Bardem did to Anton Chigurh in that entire movie. The second question you will ask is how this movie managed to slip under the radar and receive only nominations for Affleck and for its camerawork. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was one of the five best movies of the 2007 easy. Maybe even in the top three. It is definitely the best western of the past two decades.

At a certain point in this grandly majestic yet extraordinarily intimate epic you will be reminded of John Lennon. Or, to be more precise, you will be reminded of the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Lennon, Mark David Chapman. Make no mistake, this film is not intended to be yet another in the long line of mostly fictional biopics of the legendary badman of the wild, wild Midwest. What The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford seeks to capture is something related less to the 19th century than to the 20th century; it is a portrait of fandom and the cult of celebrity. As played by Brad Pitt in his best performance since Fight Club, Jesse James is not so much a bloodthirsty, Yankee-hating rebel bank robber as he is a star. Bob Ford has grown up reading the dime novel fictionalizations of Jesse’s legend and one can see in him in such sad 20th twentieth godchildren as Chapman and John Hinckley. Bob Ford is a man, a boy really, who wants to carve out of the unrelenting Midwestern landscape in which he lives a little bit of immortality. Having no inherent talent, he latches onto Jesse James by a stroke of fortune and good luck. It is frankly impossible to imagine any other actor inhabiting this role more fully than Casey Affleck. While I have never been impressed with his brother Ben, except for his skillful direction in that other 2007 movie in which Casey impresses, Gone Baby Gone, if he manages to do nothing else, Casey Affleck will stick in my mind for this movie. Affleck’s voice somehow manages to range from petulant to defiant to arrogant to whiny all within a single sentence. The one thing Affleck never allows Bob Ford to do is devolve into a psychotic. And that is what makes him so much more frightening than Anton Chigurh.

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