Film

Possibly bloody itself from an editing-room showdown, this long-gestating adaptation of Ron Hansen’s novel reportedly prompted a conflict of visions: Precocious second-time director Dominik (Chopper) wanted to make a Terrence Malick movie, while studio bigwigs crossed their fingers and prayed for the second coming of Unforgiven. The finished film feels like a trade-off between the two. Assassination meanders through an hour of awkward lyricism before getting to the real meat: the titular mano a mano between aging outlaw Jesse James (Pitt) and would-be sidekick Bob Ford (Affleck), who eventually took out his hero—albeit in an act of self-preservation—while James straightened a picture.

Dominik and cinematographer Roger Deakins have a good eye for windswept landscapes, but the movie is at its strongest in its most classical, narrative-driven sequences. Too much time is spent establishing the circumstances of Bob’s first kill. Once it happens—in an extraordinary scene that shows a bullet to the brain doesn’t necessarily lead to instant death—the movie springs to life. Dominik’s use of actors is inspired: Wormy and quavering, Affleck seems to perform in an entirely different register from the rest of the cast, making Bob an instant pariah in his own story. The structural lapses only add to the movie’s haunting strangeness. Driven by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s plangent score, Jesse James ends with a tour de force epilogue, wringing ample satisfaction from a moment of profound waste and loss.