Rather as Italy and Spain once kicked the western back into shape in the 1960s, Australia and New Zealand are raising the genre's bar now.
Following John Hillcoat's fine film, The Proposition, written by Nick Cave, and the Russell Crowe-starring 3.10 from Yuma remake, comes this long, conversational, reflective psychological character study of a famous outlaw and the hero-worshipping kid who brings him down. Cave, this time, provides the gently evocative music, an intrinsic part of the movie, almost an extra character - as Bob Dylan was for the similarly themed Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, or Leonard Cohen for McCabe and Mrs Miller, two movies that might have acted as a freewheeling template - while the director is New Zealander Andrew Dominik, who chronicled another outlaw in Chopper, adapting Ron Hansen's novel alongside the author.
It gains from an insightful and factual voiceover that occasionally turns poetic ("Insomnia clouded his eyes like soot") in a slow, stately film. Britain's finest cinematographer Roger Deakins - on a stirring run in the great wide-open after No Country for Old Men and The Valley of Elah - gives us no bright colours and there's very little action beyond a train robbery near the start that's classic Deakins - all steam and light. And, of course, that title means there's no suspense, either.
The delights on show here are enigmatic and rare, a subtly shifting atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion and a climactic moment whose perpetrator, the eponymous Ford, is to act out on stage 800 times. This is presented as the start of celebrity culture with the face of James, whose gang carried out 25 robberies and 17 murders, recognised as readily as the US president's and his assassin, "I've been a nobody all my life" achieving fame through one act. It trails connections to Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Mark Chapman and co, without ever nudging you in the ribs about it and Brad Pitt, as the taciturn and unpredictable James, is ideal casting, part-regular bloke, part-ageing poster boy, hemmed in by fame and myth. Casey Affleck, a minor Pitt co-star in the Ocean's films and Oscar-nominated along with Deakins, makes the ingratiating, creepy outsider Ford persuasively real. Author Hansen says he saw the story as a "Shakespearean tragedy" and this film lives up to the tag.
