Review: War Machine (2017)

* *
Director: David Michod
Starring: Brad Pitt

I'll give War Machine this much: it doesn't give in to the temptation to play "Fortunate Son" at any point during its running time, even at the end when you can practically hear the opening guitar riff start in your head. In just about every other respect David Michod's film aligns with pretty much every other movie ever made about the War on Terror (the exception being the great The Hurt Locker), pointing out the follies and the hubris that have already been examined and dissected ad nauseam, offering nothing new in terms of insight, and resorting to glibness whenever it can think of nothing else to do. War Machine aims for satire but, like the conduct of the wars themselves, confuses having a mandate with having the means to fully and successfully achieve the goal. And, yes, Brad Pitt is going to make that face through the whole movie and, yes, sometimes that is pretty distracting.

Review: Allied (2016)

* * *
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard

Allied is one of the most beautiful looking films of the year. Meticulously assembled and working very hard to evoke a more classical style of movie storytelling, Allied is a different kind of film than those that populate the multiplex these days, though I wouldn't quite agree with critics who call it "old fashioned" or a "throwback" to the films of the 1940s. It draws its inspiration from films of the past - borrowing visually from David Lean (but also from the not-so-old The English Patient), a little bit from Casablanca, and structuring its second half like a noir - but its sensibility is too modern for it to properly be called old fashioned. The sex is too explicit, the violence is too explicit, and its depiction of WWII servicemen and women as surrendering to a "we could die at any moment so anything goes" hedonism is definitely outside of the realm of any old school film. It exists somewhere in between the movies of yesteryear and the movies of today and though it's not flawless in every step it takes, it succeeds in being entertaining.

Review: Fury (2014)

* * *
Director: David Ayer
Starring: Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Shia LeBeouf

For much of its running time David Ayer's Fury plays like the best movie Sam Peckinpah never made. A WWII movie about the blood and the mud, rather than ideals and the honor inherent in fighting the last good war, Ayer's film is like a punch to the gut as it builds one scene of brutality atop another. This is a story of unrelenting ugliness where circumstances have made violence, in all its forms, as natural to the characters as breathing, and it unfolds in an unromanticized fashion - at least until the end, when it finally and fully surrenders to war movie cliches and conventions. To be sure, those conventions are present even from the beginning, but it's only at the end when the story seems to find itself at the mercy of those tropes. Still, despite the stock (and arguably weak) ending, Fury is a solid movie, possessed of the visceral intensity of a film like Saving Private Ryan, even if it lacks that kind of grand scale ambition.

Review: The Counselor (2013)

* * 1/2
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem, Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz

It's easy to see why Ridley Scott's The Counselor landed with such a thud (both critical and commercial) when it arrived in theaters last fall. It's an aggressively inaccessible film, savagely violent in some places, thick with talk in most places. I admire the film for its confidence; mainstream films (and given its cast and its director, The Counselor qualifies as mainstream), even the good ones, usually seem like they've been put together by committee, designed to appeal to as many people as possible, but The Counselor has the courage to be its own animal and do its own thing. It's bold, it's fascinating, and it doesn't entirely work, but when it fails it does so on its own terms and there aren't a ton of movies you can say that about.

Review: Killing Them Softly (2012)

* *
Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Brad Pitt

Last year, when making my list of “must see” films, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly was right near the top, due in no small part to my love for his 2007 masterpiece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which I think is one of the best movies of the last 10 years. By the time Killing Them Softly actually rolled into theaters, however, my enthusiasm had dimmed and I no longer felt any sense of urgency about seeing it. I knew that I would see it eventually but, going by its tepid critical reception, I decided it could wait. I’m glad that I did because even with my expectations thoroughly checked, I still found the film disappointing. All the pieces for greatness are here, but the work never matches the ambition, and the pieces never really come together in harmony.

Ebert's Greats #14: Seven (1995)

* * * *
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman

Seven wasn't David Fincher's first feature film (that would be Alien 3), but it was the film that announced him as one of the defining directors of his generation. In lesser hands, Seven could have been just another gimicky thriller, a dark police procedural not unlike hundreds of other films of the genre. Instead, it's one of the greatest thrillers of the 90s, perhaps even of all time. Suffice it to say, going from Alien 3 to Seven is pretty much the exact opposite of a sophomore slump.

Review: Thelma and Louise (1991)

* * * *
Director: Ridley Scott
Starring: Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis, Harvey Keitel, Brad Pitt

It's weird, isn't it, the way that a movie can be released, make a big impact, fade away, and then come roaring back into the zeitgeist? 2011 marks the 20th anniversary of Thelma and Louise and during the past couple of months the film seems to keep coming up, in magazines (Vanity Fair had an article about it a couple months back), online, and lo and behold, it was on TV over the weekend. 20 years later it still holds up really well - though it's bizarre, from a 2011 standpoint, to see Brad Pitt get seventh billing and behind Stephen Tobolowsky to boot.

Review: The Tree of Life (2011)

* * * *
Director: Terrence Malick
Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn, Hunter McCracken

Whatever else you can say about Terrence Malick, you certainly can't accuse him of compromising his artistic vision for the sake of making his work more commerically viable or more easily accessible. His latest film, the long-delayed The Tree of Life, is an almost defiantly personal film that seems to have been designed to be as divisive as possible. I liked it, I know a lot of people didn't; I think this is a film that is destined to inspire a lot of strong feelings (good and bad).

Review: 12 Monkeys (1995)

* * * 1/2
Director: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt

If film and literature are anything to go by, the future is the last place you want to be. It's always bleak and horrifying. 12 Monkeys is no different - in fact, if the bleak and horrifying scale runs to 10, it's about a 9. It is also, however, very good and very entertaining.

The film begins in the future, long after a virus has ravaged humankind and contaminated the earth's surface, forcing the survivors underground until a cure can be developed. Criminals are routinely "volunteered" to venture up to the surface to collect specimens and to observe and one such convict, James Cole (Bruce Willis), proves so useful at this task that he's given the opportunity to travel back to the past. His reward upon his return will be a pardon and his mission is obtain a pure sample of the virus - there is no hope that he can do anything to stop the virus; all he can do is bring the scientists of the future something they can work with so that humanity can be restored to the earth's surface.

The virus spreads across the earth in 1997 and so Cole is sent back to 1996. The only problem is that time travel technology hasn't been perfected yet so he's actually sent back to 1990, where he promptly ends up first in police custody and then in a mental institution. There he meets two key people: his psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), and fellow patient Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt). He's eventually transported back to the future and given another opportunity to travel to 1996, though once again he goes too far back, this time ending up in the middle of a trench during WWI. When he finally does get to 1996, he kidnaps Kathryn and takes her in search of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, a terrorist organization with Goines at its head. Kathryn believes he's delusional but as they proceed further on their journey, she begins to realize that he really is from the future and that she has to find a way to help him.

Directed by Terry Gilliam (aka The Director with the Worst Luck Ever), 12 Monkeys has a very distinct and deeply unsettling look and feel. The future is grim and dark (as it must be since it's subterranean), but the past really isn't depicted much differently. Society already seems to be in the midst of decay before the virus even hits - there's a grittiness to this film that I quite liked compared to the sleekness of most science fiction films. The choices that Gilliam makes throughout, particularly the decision to film some scenes at an angle, go a long way towards creating the off-kilter feel that permeates the story. This is a director's movie through and through and Gilliam is a real vissionary.

The screenplay, written by David and Janet Peoples and inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short film Le Jette, is strong enough, though I think that it tips its hand too early and starts telegraphing the ending pretty much from the beginning. Gilliam's direction and the acting - particularly from Pitt - make up for any shortcomings however. Pitt is always at his best when playing weirdoes and psychos and though he comes incredibly close to over-acting here, his complete commitment to the character makes it work. His twitchy, hyper-active performance also plays well against the more subdued performances by Willis and Stowe. All in all 12 Monkeys holds up very well and is eminently enjoyable.

Review: Inglorious Basterds (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Mélanie Laurent

Tarantino’s latest is a glorious mess of a movie that plays entirely by its own rules. It isn’t a film of any great depth, but as glossy summer entertainment goes, I don’t know that you can do much better than this one. It’s a violent, darkly comic, beautiful looking film that occasionally goes off the rails but ultimately makes for a great time at the movies.

The film begins like a western, immediately evoking early scenes from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (it begins, in fact, with the words “Once upon a time... in Nazi occupied France”). In the distance a dairy farmer sees the SS coming down the long dirt road. He sends one of his daughters to get water so that he can wash up. They wait anxiously as the Germans take their time and eventually the farmer finds himself sitting at his table with Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz in a disarmingly and sinisterly joyful performance), who coaxes him into revealing the whereabouts of the Drefyus family, whom he has been hiding. The family is slaughtered save for Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), whom Landa allows to escape and who lives for years by hiding in plain sight in Paris.

Elsewhere a group of Jewish soldiers, mostly American, have been assembled under the command of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) for the purpose of killing Nazis. Dropped into occupied France in 1941, the group quickly gains a reputation for brutality and the Nazi high command becomes increasingly desperate to catch them. By 1944 the group is in league with British film critic turned soldier Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) and German film star/spy Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) in a plot to take out some of the major Nazis at a Paris film premiere. The premiere, as it happens, will take place at a theatre which Shosanna has inherited and she has a plan of her own to kill some Nazis.

The film boasts a wealth of characters with the typical Tarantino flair. One of the things I love about Tarantino’s films in general is that you never walk away from one thinking about that one really memorable character because there are always about a dozen really memorable characters and the casting is always perfect. I went into the film with a bit of trepidation regarding Pitt because the trailers made it look like he was really hamming it up. As it turns out he is hamming it up, but it works well with the overall, over the top feel of the film and I really can’t imagine the character being played any other way or by any other actor. However, as good as Pitt is and as extraordinary as Waltz – whose performance has been garnering the most attention – is, the real standout for me was Laurent, whose Shosanna is the heart of the story. Her performance, which is very understated and grounded, is on the other end of the spectrum from Pitt’s, giving the film a nice feeling of balance.

The film has been accused by some of trivializing World War II in general and the Holocaust specifically because there is nary a mention of The Final Solution. I don’t really think this accusation is fair because, as anyone who has seen the movie can tell you, the war as we know it isn’t really the war being dealt with in this film. Inglorious Basterds exists outside of history and in an alternate reality. Besides which, any direct dealing with the Holocaust wouldn’t fit with the film’s overall tone, which is darkly comedic. One of my favourite shots occurs during a scene when Hitler (Martin Wuttke) rails at his officers to find the Basterds. In the background there's painter creating a giant Hitler painting who keeps turning to study him and capture some nuance of his person. As with all Tarantino’s films, the beauty is in the smaller details.

If there is an underlying socio-political meaning to the film, I would argue that it doesn’t have to do with the darkness of the human soul but rather with the power of film itself. Film was an invaluable medium for Hitler and the Nazis, particularly the propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl, who gets a few mentions here. The plot conceived by Shosanna involves locking the top Nazi brass in the theatre and then setting her stock of nitrate film prints on fire. Film, which helped give birth to the Nazi movement, is now tasked with being an agent of its destruction and thus Inglorious Basterds might be read as working to reclaim the medium from some of its worst abusers.

By and large, the film really worked for me, although there are two things that didn’t. First is the film’s use of David Bowie’s song “Cat People,” which I found jarring and really took me out of the movie, although this anachronism perhaps eases the way for the grand inaccuracy of the film’s finale. The second thing has to do with the film within the film. Much of Basterds is subtitled because the German characters speak German and the French characters speak French rather than falling back on the old movie standard of having characters speak accented English. Yet, in spite of this, the German propaganda film within the film is in English. That really bugged me. That being said, however, these are very small quibbles with a film that is overall incredibly entertaining.

Review: Burn After Reading (2008)

* * *
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Starring: Frances McDormand, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton

Burn After Reading is a farcical look at paranoia, national security, and spy games that manages to be equal parts funny and sad, shallow and deep. In it characters stumble into a web of political intrigue that no one really comprehends, mostly because there’s essentially nothing to comprehend because they only think that they’re in the middle of something. I don’t know that it’s entirely successful as a film, but I liked it just enough to recommend it.

At the centre of the maelstrom that will become this plot is Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), who is let go from his position as an analyst at the CIA and decides to use his newfound free time to write his memoirs, which his wife Katie (played by a wonderfully flinty Tilda Swinton) thinks would be of little appeal to readers anywhere. Katie is carrying on an affair with Harry (George Clooney), who is also married, and planning to divorce Osbourne. As part of that effort, she copies financial information from his computer to a disc (also, inadvertently, copying parts of the memoir) and that disc ends up being lost at a gym where it is found by Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand). Linda needs money for a series of plastic surgeries she’s decided she wants – nay, needs - and Chad comes up with the idea to ransom the disc.

Things get increasingly convoluted. When Osbourne refuses to pay for the return of the disc, Linda decides to try to sell it to the Russians (why the Russians? you might ask and you would be joined by pretty much everyone other than Linda). Meanwhile, Harry – who Linda meets over the internet and begins dating - becomes increasingly paranoid as he realizes that he’s being followed, and the CIA, having been tipped off by the Russian embassy about the attempted sale of “information,” is baffled by the various goings-on they witness through subsequent surveillance (“They all seem to be sleeping together,” a perplexed agent informs his supervisor).

The set-up for the story is a bit slow – I’d go so far as to say that the first half-hour plods along – but once the ball gets rolling, the plot unwinds itself at an almost dizzying speed. To be honest, I didn’t really start to like the movie until Pitt showed up and proceeded to be awesome during every moment he was on-screen. He has so many great scenes, from his initial phone conversation with Osbourne where he adopts a raspy voice to extort him (“I thought you might be worried... about the security... of your shit.”), to his face-to-face meeting with Osbourne where he keeps squinting his eyes in an attempt to appear tough. This last scene ends with Osbourne illuminating all the reasons why Chad is stupid including the fact that he came to the meeting on a bike, and all Chad gets out of it is that Osbourne has mistaken his bike for a Schwinn. Pitt is genius at being a moron.

The comedy that is Chad is offset by a few more serious elements: Linda’s self-esteem issues which manifest themselves in both her desire for plastic surgery and her desperation for the approval of the men she meets over the internet (she cites sense of humour as an important factor and yet when one dates fails to pass the test, she sleeps with him anyway), and her boss’ (Richard Jenkins) infatuation with her which leads him to involve himself in an increasingly volatile situation despite his reservations. But for all that, this is a comedy and one that, in its brilliant final exchange, effectively summarizes the insanity of the last decade.

Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

* * * *
Director: David Fincher
Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a beautiful, glossy epic about enduring love, the inevitability of loss, and the futility of fighting against the current of time. I can see from other reviews that this is proving to be a divisive film, one you either love or hate. Well, I loved it and let me tell you why:

The film traces two lives, one going backward and one going forward. First we meet Daisy (Cate Blanchett), on her deathbed in a New Orleans hospital as hurricane Katrina bears down, and then, in flashback, we meet Benjamin (Brad Pitt), whom doctors give up for dead as soon as he’s born. Benjamin suffers from a strange affliction which makes it appear that he’s an old man when he’s just a baby and as time carries on it becomes clear that he’s getting physically younger with each year. He’s raised by Queenie (Taraji Henson) in a home for the elderly where he seems to fit right in and where he meets Daisy, who appears to be decades younger than him, though in actuality they were born only a few years apart. Benjamin grows down and Daisy grows up and they drift away from and back towards each other until the time finally comes when they’re about the same age.

The success of the film rests largely on the ability of Pitt and Blanchett to play the span of decades, which both accomplish with admirable skill. Obviously makeup and computer graphics have been used to aid in their physical transformations, but these are performances that add up to a lot more than visual trickery. Pitt’s role is especially difficult because the younger he looks, the older he must seem and he imbues Benjamin with the quiet wisdom of a man who has seen and experienced much and solemnly accepts that things change and that sometimes holding on to the past does more damage than good. Blanchett is luminous, particularly as Daisy attempts to negotiate the shifting balance in her relationship with Benjamin as he becomes more youthful and “perfect” while she grows older as less perfect.

The film is based on the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald but departs from it pretty significantly. In fact, the only things the two works really have in common are the premise, the name of the protagonist and the title, which isn’t a bad thing because while Fitzgerald’s piece is well-written, it’s ultimately quite frivolous and lacking in resonance. The film, on the other hand, is very moving once you get past the fact that it’s been built on a template borrowed from Forrest Gump (both screenplays were written by Eric Roth). There were moments when I felt that Button was a bit derivative, but it ultimately won me over, which is no mean feat given that it reminded me of a movie that I loathe. But while Gump is hung on a maudlin string of too clever by half pop culture references, Button doesn’t spend half its running time winking at you.

I doubt that even the greatest champion of this film would argue that it’s without its flaws. With a running time of nearly 3 hours it’s long and there is a lot of fat that could have been trimmed from it. You could also argue that the longest section of the story concerns Benjamin and Daisy when they’re at their least interesting – during that sweet spot where they’re level with each other in terms of age. I would certainly agree that both Pitt and Blanchett are at their best as the elderly versions of their characters, and I would also agree that it occasionally wanders too far into the realm of sentimentality. All that being said, however, it struck a chord with me and I enjoyed it immensely.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Fight Club (1999)

Director: David Fincher
Starring: Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter

Fight Club is not a movie about men who fight. Rather, it is about the feminization of men through consumer culture and the subsequent alienation of men from their own bodies. The idea here is that the only way to reclaim the essential masculinity that has been lost is by beating the ever loving Jesus out of another man, and by getting your own ass kicked in turn. These are men boiled down to their primitive essence which, as the protagonist discovers, only leads to a different form of chaos.

Short version: An unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton) who can’t sleep, whose possession have all come from an Ikea catalogue, who spends his free time crashing various support groups, meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) on a plane. They get into a fight. They get into more fights. They start a club. The club becomes a cult. The cult deals a blow to the Capitalist infrastructure. The end.

Long version: The Narrator can’t sleep because he can’t reconcile his conception of masculinity to the way that he and the men around him live their lives. He goes to support groups, including one for men suffering from testicular cancer, where all the men cry and one has developed breasts. “This is Bob,” the Narrator says. “Bob has bitch tits.” We then see Bob hug the disgusted Narrator to his chest. Bob is no longer a “man” in the traditional sense because of what he now has (the aforementioned “bitch tits”) and because of what he’s lost (his testicles). Instead, he’s a grotesque mutation representing what the Narrator fears that he himself is becoming mentally, if not physically. In contrast to Bob, the group also includes Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter) who, like the Narrator, is a support group crasher. “I have more of a right to be there than you. You still have your balls,” she tells him. When the Narrator asks if she’s kidding, she replies, “I don’t know… am I?” When the women are “men” and the men are “women,” how can anyone develop a stable sense of identity?

But the Narrator’s problem isn’t just the support groups, it’s also the way that he’s surrounded himself with catalogue merchandise. He informs us that everything in his apartment has been ordered from Ikea, that each item only fed his desire for the next. This is problematic because men are not meant to be consumers. Women are supposed to be the consumers, women like Marla Singer (as in the sewing machine). Being a consumer invariably leads to being image conscious (when the Narrator asks Tyler, “Is that what a man is supposed to look like?” he’s asking the central question of the film), they become brand loyal, they become feminized through their heightened awareness of how they look. “Do you know what a duvet is?” Tyler asks. “It’s a blanket. Why do guys like you and me know what a duvet is? Is it essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the bi-products of a lifestyle obsession.” This is why Tyler, the soap salesman’s (the creator of product, not the buyer) first task is to cleanse the Narrator’s life by ridding him of all his possessions. Once free of his “things,” the Narrator is free to embrace his true, primal self. He gets in fights, he doesn’t care if he shows up to work with a swollen face and bloodstained clothes. He’s a real man, the way that he’s supposed to be.

Or is he? The fact that the Narrator and Tyler are the same person becomes apparent fairly early to anyone who is paying attention. The fact that the Narrator kills Tyler, or, rather, the Tyler part of himself, suggests that the lifestyle Tyler is promoting is just as wrong as that which he rejects. When Tyler turns the Narrator away from the dominant culture, he isn’t encouraging him to embrace his individuality, but a different version of conformity, where the male body is fetishised not according to the aesthetics of advertising, but in correlation to its ability to give and take punishment (it might as well have been called Fight Porn for the way the camera lingers lustily on Pitt’s bloodied torso). There are no individuals in Fight Club, just uniform creatures seeking to attain a kind of ultra-masculinity that is no more real or true than the feminized masculinity they were embracing at the beginning. Both are just images, poses that have been adopted to suit a lifestyle they’ve decided to live. What the Narrator discovers in the end is that his identity (both his gender identity and his identity as a person) depends not on how he looks or what he does or the items that fill his life, but instead on what and how he thinks about those things. It’s individuality that he attains at the end, which is freedom from neither the feminine nor the masculine, but rather from the Image Cult that both sides attempt to impose. While this message can sometimes be lost in the blood and gore of the story, it remains that this film has more to say about the way the we relate to – and are defined by – culture than any other film to come out in the last decade.

Review: The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

It’s a shame that Warner Bros. released this movie with so little ceremony and let it languish and die before it could find a broader audience. This is a film that is visually and narratively stunning. A mournful elegy on a way of life that has passed and a thoughtful meditation on the nature of celebrity. It features two wonderful central performances – those of Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, and Brad Pitt as Jesse James – and is directed with admirable confidence and skill. It’s a film that will reward you if you care to seek it out.

The story begins with the last train robbery of the James gang, headed by Jesse and his older brother Frank (Sam Shepard). Bob Ford wanders into the scene, a brother of Charley (Sam Rockwell), one of the gang’s members. He insinuates himself into Jesse’s life, regarding him with a mixture of hero-worship and desire. Frank doesn’t like Bob and later, when Jesse brings Bob home to stay, you get the feeling that Zee James (Mary-Louise Parker) is unsettled by him as well. Eventually, as the title reveals, Bob will slay Jesse, but that’s not where the movie ends. It goes beyond that to examine what it means that Jesse James has been murdered and examines how a criminal who killed people in cold blood became part of the romantic myth of the American west.

Andrew Dominik, who both wrote and directed the film, lets the story unfold slowly. We know where the story is going, but it takes its time getting there, letting us get to know the members of the James gang and get a feel for their relationships and for the surrounding landscape. The landscape becomes another character, sometimes flat and seeming to crush the characters between earth and sky, and always wide-open. Characters appear as specs on the horizon and ride in to focus in a number of beautiful shots. From a purely visual standpoint, my favourite shot is at the beginning, when train the gang is going to rob comes to an abrupt stop in the darkness and Jesse is bathed in the steam from the engine. Throughout the film, Jesse appears to us as if through a mist – the mist of Bob’s mind and the mist of history. There are scenes of voice-over narration over top of images that are just slightly blurry, as if we are watching re-enactments from a historical documentary. Jesse is always at a distance from us – what we know we learn through the voice-over’s flat, matter-of-fact narration, and Bob’s own perspective as he and Jesse dance closer to their destinies.

The moment of truth is fascinating as Jesse, weary and increasingly unstable emotionally, more or less invites Bob to murder him. He removes his guns and places them slowly on his couch for Bob to see, then walks across the room to clean the dust off a photo. In its reflection he sees Bob and allows himself to be shot. For Bob, too, this is treated as something inevitable. After he shoots Jesse, he collapses on the couch, his act having taken everything out of him. You don’t get the feeling that he wanted to kill Jesse as much as he recognized that he must, just as much as Jesse recognized that he had to let him.

As Bob, Casey Affleck runs a gauntlet of character development. We meet him first as an awkward 19-year-old who idolizes the famous outlaw. He wants to be Jesse James. Failing that, he wants to be with Jesse James, as the latent undertone of numerous scenes suggest. Failing that, he must kill Jesse James. Following the murder, for which he’s never charged due to a deal made with the Governor, Bob capitalizes on his own new-found fame, appearing before packed houses for the staging of re-enactments of the murder with Charley playing Jesse. Eventually, he himself is assassinated and he seems to accept it as easily as Jesse did.

The way the film deals with the assassination and its aftermath comments strongly on the nature of celebrity culture. Jesse’s corpse is displayed for the public, photographed, made in to a sideshow much to Zee’s horror. Bob is reviled for having murdered him even though the public flocks to his show, eagerly to see him recreate the murder for them, and even though Jesse murdered a number of people in cold blood. Bob dreams of visiting the families of those people, whom he imagines would thank him for having killed the outlaw. But the bad things Jesse did cease to matter with his death - he becomes a myth, a figure of romance. People pay to tour the homes where he lived, they buy pictures of his corpse, write songs about him, name their children after him. “You’re gonna break a lot of hearts,” Jesse tells Bob. And he does.