Pitt handpicked Australian director Andrew Dominik ("Chopper") for the project, and hired Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler to provide a look that might capture the spirit of the book's stylized, antique prose.
There's a lot about this ambitious project that works, starting with Pitt's embodiment of hunted outlaw Jesse James as a man elevated and doomed by his own celebrity.
The other title role - that of Ford - goes to Casey Affleck, whose complex performance is a treatise on the fraught celebrity/fan relationship: how idolatry is mixed with envy, how devotee and stalker can merge into a single being.
The film opens with James' career as an outlaw in decline - he splits with brother Frank (Sam Shepard), his regular gang fragments and scatters, and Jesse surrounds himself with second-raters (the prototypical entourage?). One is Robert Ford, an eager little runt of a man who sleeps with a hatbox full of James-inspired pulp literature under his bed. Ford is instantly disliked and feared by those closest to the outlaw, but tolerated by James, for a variety of suggested reasons (Ford watches James bathe - was he gay?).
The movie's most elaborate conceit is that James - hunted by the Pinkertons, squeezed by the disappearing frontier, made obsolete by time and history - foresaw his early death and selected Ford as the man to make him a martyr to outlaw iconography.
But if Ford's treacherous act is meant to be tragic and moving, it sure doesn't feel that way. Perhaps because efforts to ground James in history as a vicious murderer, capable of his own cold-blooded and treacherous assassinations, succeed only too well.
