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WARNER
Bros. Pictures brings together the talented ensemble of
Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard, Mary-Louise
Parker and Sam Rockwell in the acclaimed thriller ‘The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.’
Written
and directed by Andrew Dominik, ‘Assassination’ has been
hailed by US critics as one of the best films of 2007
and has already won three awards—Best Actor for Brad
Pitt in the Venice Film Festival, and Best Supporting
Actor for Casey Affleck in the National Board of Review,
and San Francisco Film Critics Circle yearly
citations. Affleck was also nominated in the Golden
Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards.
There
have been countless books written and tales told about
America’s most famous outlaw Jesse James (Pitt)—all of
them colorful and fascinating, all focused on his
larger-than-life public persona and daring exploits, and
most of them bearing only incidental reference to the
truth.
To those
he robbed and terrorized, and to the families of those
he admittedly killed, he may have been just a criminal,
but in the sensational newspaper articles and dime
novels chronicling the James Gang throughout the 1870s,
Jesse was the object of awe and admiration. He was a
Robin Hood, they suggested, targeting railroad owners
and banks that exploited poor farmers. Most important,
to an increasingly buttoned-down and citified population
leading ordinary lives, he was the last frontiersman—a
symbol of freedom and the American spirit, a charismatic
rebel who flouted the law and lived by his own
rules...by all accounts, a legend.
Foremost
among his admirers was Robert Ford (Affleck), an
idealistic and ambitious young man who had devoted his
life to the hope of one day riding alongside his idol.
He could never have imagined that history would
ultimately mark him as the “the dirty little coward” who
shot Jesse in the back.
But who
was Jesse James, really—behind the folklore and the
selling of newspapers? And who was Robert Ford, just 19
and a member of Jesse’s inner circle, who was able to
bring down such a formidable figure when lawmen across
10 states had tried and failed? How did they come to be
friends and what happened between them in the days and
hours leading up to the gunshot that would end one man’s
life and become the definition and sum total of
another’s? No one will ever know the whole truth.
‘The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’
delves into the private lives of America’s most
notorious outlaw and his unlikely assassin to offer a
new perspective on a legend and address the question of
what really may have transpired in the months before
that infamous shooting. |
