Chinese language - Pitt turns outlaw in 'Jesse James'

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ENTERTAINMENT / Movies






Pitt turns outlaw in 'Jesse James'


(AP)
Updated: 2007-09-18 10:08





While news about Jesse James crawled its way across 19th century America
— compared to today's lightning-fast Internet — the tone was
uncannily comparable to today's celebrity coverage, Brad Pitt found in
reading those old accounts.

"I will say, I was surprised to see how tabloid journalism was alive and
well even then and operating in the same way, just sensationalizing a
complete fabrication of untruths," said Brad Pitt, who stars as the
legendary outlaw in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford."

"There's just more of it today. There's more of it in quantity, but the
execution's the same. In that day, when you only had a newspaper to get
your information, that would have been the extent of it. But it doesn't
seem to have changed at all," Pitt told The Associated Press at the
Toronto International Film Festival.

Pitt and Angelina Jolie, stars of the 2005 hit "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," have
been the quarry of celebrity photographers and the object of incessant
tabloid gossip since they hooked up amid the breakup of Pitt's marriage
to Jennifer Aniston. A media vigil preceded the birth of their daughter
in Namibia last year, and crowds swelled during the Toronto festival
everywhere they went.

In the late 1800s, James was able to move anonymously through America
under a series of aliases, but his notoriety was unparalleled. James'
image as a Robin Hood-style bandit of the people — a myth he helped
perpetuate himself — had made him a folk hero to the public and a demon
to the railroads.

Based on Ron Hansen's novel, "Assassination of Jesse James" dissects the
James myth to present a charismatic man in the last year of his life, as
his sense of security crumbles and he is overwhelmed by paranoia that
associates are selling him out to the law.

Into James' inner circle comes young idolator Ford (Casey Affleck), who
has grown up on romanticized stories of the outlaw's deeds. Initially an
intimate, Ford later becomes an object of scorn for Pitt's increasingly
unpredictable James.

Ford eventually feels compelled to become James' executioner, coming to
believe it's almost a civic duty.

"I don't know what led to his idea, the need to destroy the very thing
that he worshipped, but that's certainly what's going on here. You have a
demoralized boy, a boy who's subject to humiliation, and in his quiet
hours has this lust for the Jesse James celebrity, the Jesse James
phenomenon," said Pitt, 43.

"Then at the point where he meets Jesse James, meets his idol, and his
idol spurns him, it becomes that thing, needing to destroy the thing you
love to become equal with it again."

At two hours, 40 minutes, "Assassination of Jesse James," which opens
Friday, is a challenging tale, yet one that has drawn praise for the
lyrical melancholy of its 19th century landscapes and for the key
performances. The film earned the best-actor prize at the Venice Film
Festival for Pitt, a previous supporting-actor Academy Awards nominee for
"Twelve Monkeys" who could be in contention for a lead-actor Oscar this
time.

The celebrity mystique that surrounds Pitt meshed well with the mythic
nature of James, said Andrew Dominik, director of "Assassination of Jesse
James."

"It was the sort of part that you could cast a movie star in and it would
make sense," Dominik said. "It wouldn't be miscasting Brad, who you never
really feel like you know on-screen. He's always retained kind of an
essential mystery. He's not a person people really identify with. He's
more of an object to them. They aspire to be him, but they don't really
identify with him.

"Those were really good qualities for Jesse. They're both enigmatic and
charismatic."

Pitt first caught widespread notice in a scene-stealing role in 1991's
"Thelma & Louise" and went on to star in such films as "Legends of the
Fall," "Spy Game," "Troy" and last year's acclaimed "Babel," co-starring
Cate Blanchett.


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