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Rating: A dive into American history/legend.
The fog, a film out of time and space, suspended in the slow unfolding of events.
The bandit and murderer Jesse James, played by a good (but nothing more) Brad Pitt, has disbanded his gang after one last stagecoach robbery. The film starts like this, amidst the preparations for the heist and the introduction of Jesse James' friend/enemy, Robert Ford, (the cowardly, a very talented Casey Affleck) eager to earn the attention of Jesse and his brother.
The relationship between the two titular characters is the cornerstone of the work, which unfolds amidst dark moods and a narrative disillusionment that eschews spectacularity.
This benefits the atmosphere created, building its charm precisely in moments of reflection, framing the characters from an almost psychoanalytic perspective.
There's the bandit, tired of his path of growth, deluded in the hope of drowning the evil he constitutes in the everyday life of the family, and the determined, yet fundamentally fragile "coward," suspended between morbid impulses bordering on homosexuality and a desire for domination and affirmation of his personality.
Robert Ford studies the "friend," his habits, his attitude towards life, and comes to hate his ineffable depth. Aware of not being able to be like him, in terms of comparison, he decides he has no choice but to replace him completely. Jesse James, through Robert Ford's eyes, represents the fulfillment of all his purposes, at any cost; the negative sides, the burdens he carries, are integral parts of perfection.
Indicatively though slightly predictable is the scene of exchange between the two protagonists. Robert killed Jesse (in a simply magnificent scene) seeking glory from having done something for the common good, but it is not the common good, here, that is the right thing.
Robert, having become a popular hero, will stage the scene of the murder multiple times in the theater, until it becomes clear to him and his "audience" that cowardice turns an act of justice into a hypocritical betrayal. The blameworthy, the monster becomes him, and his alienation from life becomes total.
Useless, but further clarifying, the last half-hour of the film, the "after" in Robert Ford's life, orphaned of a purpose and the paradoxically necessary figure to achieve it.
The film deals with the paradox of idolatry towards an outlaw, very different from the thief who steals from the rich to give to the poor (as Nick Cave sings in a cameo, towards the end of the film), but a human being swimming in earthly mediocrity, a fallen angel who looks towards heaven deluded.
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