Robert Ford and Jesse James

The light going out of his eyes before he could find the right words . . .

I just finished watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and I didn't much like the movie itself. It was nothing to do with the story or the acting; it was the length and slowness of it and the aspects it showed, although I'm sure that was part of the point. There's a scene toward the beginning in which Jesse James leans down and puts his ear to the tracks and listens for the train he already knows is coming. When he does that it isn't to check the time or to make last-minute preparations. It's almost just to enjoy it. Maybe because it's Brad Pitt you end up thinking back to A River Runs Through It and fly fishing; it's a moment of "beautiful" skill, something that feels like it was written by Hemingway. Out in the darkness you hear the train and it is loud and getting louder. But then music starts playing and it is even louder and it becomes a different kind of movie. The music says, "The train is not important."

What is shown to be important throughout the movie is, as Paul Connell puts it, the "deep longing for a man of a type too scarce in the American experience" (Jan. 2008 Communitas). In that sense the real genius of the movie (though I don't think it takes a movie to express it) is not its main character or his "distorted" psyche; we are not prepared throughout the movie for a revelation about Jesse James.* What we are prepared for is a revelation about Robert Ford, something we hadn't thought about - but that's not the end of it either (it's not some "sympathy for the devil" ploy). Dr. Connell is right to call Robert Ford a warning, but that warning is not ultimately against the kind of identification that "turns the desire for the heroic into its reverse, with Ford standing as [Jesse's] double"; instead it is a warning for the audience that its "longing" (for James, or someone like him) risks the collective loss of the ability to recognize men at all (including one's own self). To indulge in longing in the sense of the crowd - the public that obsesses over the life and death of Jesse James to the point of viewing his corpse "on its bed of ice" and petitioning for the pardon of Ford's murderer - is to close off genuine recognition and self-knowledge.

During the movie, which instead of a "morality play" we could call a "recognition play," we find ourselves praising and wanting the kind of knowledge of others which James possesses: the ability to know when someone's lying, when you've been betrayed, when someone aims to kill you (an unstable gift which betrays him in a scene with a young boy). Ford himself praises and wants it. But he does not achieve it - in one scene he has difficulty deciding which of the gang to kill. It is true that such knowledge belongs to few men and it should stay that way. But that's not enough; we already knew that.

And so the epilogue (if you will) of the movie is the most interesting because it holds the meaning of the story that is always at the outer edge of the story itself. We learn it is only to a woman (who is willing to "change the subject" - to lift the burden) that Ford can speak of his (non)recollection of the death of Jesse James, and of his own part in it, of his motivations, of his lack of the "ingredients" of the hero. The audiences that crowded his re-enactments had long since anonymously named him "coward" and made him the pharmakos.

He was ashamed of his boasting, his pretensions of courage and ruthlessness; he was sorry about his cold-bloodedness, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case.

Which, in the end, is worse - to be a coward and through your cowardice to learn who you are, or to be an entire people incapable - through "a generalized wish for revenge against Robert Ford" - of allowing that recognition to survive?

* Unless it be the way in which he's always hearing about himself.