The Coward Robert Ford

March 15, 2008

This movie ended up catching me by surprise. Being about Jesse James one might expect train robberies and bank heists.. but, except for an opening train robbery, the movie mostly follows the lines of a psychological thriller. Jesse James (Brad Pitt) appears increasingly violent and moody, while his hero-worshipping follower Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) comes to realize that he must assassinate James. The psychological toll of being around James is obvious. He is always prying and looking for weakness.. always threatening.. and for Ford his past idolatry of James is a mental burden. Ford is finally given the chance to shoot James, but, contrary to what one might expect, this climactic moment does not come across as a moment of cowardice. Young Ford seems for an instant to be breaking free of some fascination that has held him for too long.

Surrounding the basic psychological thriller is a wealth of material about the public version of James that circulated in popular serials and stories and songs. It is the juxtaposition of this public version of James with the realism of his portrayal that makes this a notable film. We see Ford's box of James memorabilia and we hear him recite to James all the little ways that they are alike. Then after Ford's assassination of James we see him performing that defining deed before audiences and receiving notoriety for it. But the public version of James' death turns firmly against Ford by the end and he is a hated man for his "cowardly" deed. In the end he is murdered by a self-appointed avenger of the death of James. (All this, by the way, seems to follow the actual events.)

The realistic portrait of James is powerful in its screw-loose violence, but Ford is complex in a different way. He is a man at the mercy of public narratives. As a boy he buys into the James legend.. only to get his illusions stripped away by the man's senseless violence. Then after he assassinates James he is taken up into the vortex of public narrative.. and watches as he slowly becomes the bad guy in the most common telling of the story. I felt disappointment when Ford proved unable to defend himself and offer a counter narrative to the public version of events. If we define courage as the ability to let one's private sense of truth overrule the public narrative, then Ford's crowning courageous act was the assassination of Jesse James.

The public narrative would be written by people like his mother who gave James the following epitaph: "In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here." The film.. in what I hope is an ironic title.. does right in giving us back Robert Ford as a semi-hero.. at least for a moment.