Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: Buried Environmental History

In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, the James/Younger gang historically and mythically fights the railroad for lands confiscated by the federal government to serve the railroad. The gang’s robberies were seen by many as retaliation for what Southern farmers saw as land grabbing. This current Western at least peripherally responds to environmental issues related to conflicts between Northern industrial and Southern agrarian visions of land use, worldviews resting on progressive and populist versions of progress, respectively. As a traditional Western, however, the debate is unexplored and hidden behind the epic study of a rebellious hero at the film’s center.

Even though Roger Ebert claims there are homosexual undertones in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, especially in relation to Robert Ford’s (Casey Affleck) obsession with Jesse (Brad Pitt), he calls the film a “classic  Western epic” partly because “it was photographed in the wide opens spaces of western Canada, where the land is so empty, it creates a vacuum demanding men to become legends,” rebellious heroes like Jesse James who gains mythic stature because he at least seems to rob symbols of corrupt corporate power for a reason: They stole his and other families’ land for a railroad that runs on greed in the name of progress, a progress that serves only the few. According to Ebert, the director, Andrew Dominik, “portrays his hero at a time when most men were so powerless, they envied Jesse James even for imposing his will on such as they.” In The Assassination of Jesse James, Jesse serves a community by embracing a mythos that empowers the populous even when their lands and lives are threatened.

            Unlike earlier sagas of Jesse James, however, the history behind Jesse’s robberies and murders goes unmentioned and emerges only in the portrayal of Jesse James. According to Ebert, “Brad Pitt embodies Jesse James’ mythic stature as if long accustomed to it.” And Peter Travers explains, “Brad Pitt totally nails it as Jesse James” in what Travers calls “this intimate epic.” The only reference to Jesse’s past comes through a voiceover at the film’s opening that calls Jesse a “Southern loyalist and a guerilla,” so the war never ended for him. No mention is made to the James boys’ loss of their land to the railroad, even as they rob another train near the film’s opening.

Only the landscape itself points to the environmental history behind the robberies, a landscape that becomes a character that seems to conquer figures who are shot and left in grasses or frozen streams. A claim that the James boys are “Getting back at Union men for wrongs” merely nods to the narrator’s opening words. Jesse James may have been a Southern loyalist and a guerilla, but in the James myth, he’s something more. He’s a hero defending the land and agrarian values of a post-Civil War South. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford adheres so tightly to the classic epic Western genre that it buries even that environmental message.