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 U.S. critics as one of the best films of 2007 and has already won three awards – Best Actor for Brad Pitt in the recent 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 is also nominated in the Golden Globes and the upcoming 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 importantly, 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 nineteen and a member of Jesse’s inner circle, who was able to bring down such a formidable figure when lawmen across ten 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.
The year is 1881 and Jesse is 34 years old. As he plans his next great robbery, he continues to wage war on his enemies who are trying to collect the reward money and the glory riding on his capture. But the greatest threat to his life could come from those he would trust the most. – Warner Bros. Pictures
