The two films that have hit me the hardest here in Toronto are Control, which I wrote about here, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Both films, based on real-life characters and incidents, are simultaneously technically superlative and heartbreaking. With one day left to go in my Toronto 2007 tenure, I find myself nursing heartache for two, studio-backed movies which I’ll soon be able to pay $11 American to see again at will. And sitting here in my hotel room, listening to Joy Division and New Order and thinking about Sam Riley’s performance in Control and Brad Pitt and Paul Schneider’s in Jesse James, there is no such thing as soon enough.

Two weeks ago, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford was the film Warner Brothers had “no idea what to do with.” As of this writing, it’s the most gushed-over title at the Toronto Film Festival, and word has hit the wires that star Brad Pitt has won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. If the folks at WB still havn’t figured out what to do with Andrew Dominik’s masterful, Malickean tragedy of celebrity envy, they probably don’t deserve to have their name on it.

It’s hard to know where to start when describing a film like this––it’s difficult to marry words to an out-of-body experience. I’ll say this: I can’t imagine Pitt ever stumbling on a role that suits him better. Vacillating between icy swagger and red-hot blood-thirst, equally terrifying and seductive, his Jesse James pushes the idea of star quality beyond the material realm. Constantly appearing in rooms or at doors as if out of thin air, described by the narrator as having the power to slow time and change air temperature just by walking into a room, this Jesse James is something between a ghost and a god. Age 34 when we meet him, and soon to be abandoned by his brother/life-long partner in crime, Jesse has the option of sliding comfortably into anonymous domesticity, or building a new gang from a dwindling pool of wannabes and hangers-on.

Jesse picks the latter. Despite his mounting paranoia concerning public life, James gets an obvious kick from basking in the admiration of (and inciting fear amongst) lesser criminals. This puts James in the path of Bob Ford (played in a career-defining performacne by Casey Affleck). The 19-year-old outlaw wannabe kind of knows he’s a creepazoid, but doesn’t know enough about people to know that it’s not the best idea to introduce oneself to a prospective employer with a ten-minute disclaimer about how you’re not as much of a creepazoid as people think. When Bob asks if he can ride on a job with the James gang in spite of his admitted faults, Frank James says, “You don’t have the ingredients, son.” But whether it’s some kind of sublimation of the loss of his own brother, or simple psychopathic egomania, Jesse James likes having Bob around, and he lets his young fan stick around even after sending the rest of the gang away. Over the next year, Jesse and Bob will move in and out of one another’s orbit, until a series of betrayals on either side push the pair towards the event pointed at in the title.

It’s the illustration of these betrayals, and particularly the detail in which they’re rendered and the emphasis on determinism, that most significantly blew me away. This takes up the “slow” part of the film, the middle hour in between the heist that first brings Jesse and Bob together, and the fatal money shot; it’s the section of the film that even its strongest supporters have acknowledged could very well turn audiences off. The problem is not with the filmmaking (which in this section, as elsewhere, is exemplary on almost every level), but with the grand-scale treatment of the material–this kind of pacing will feel unnaturally labored to anyone who hasn’t been watching certain Kubrick films on a regular basis.

In other words, Jesse James looks like a painting and plays like an epic novel. There are immediate pleasures to be found in the cinematography and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ eerie score, and in the sexy, comic subplot touched off by a character named Dick Liddil’s inability to keep his namesake in his pants. But otherwise, it’s likely the most “difficult” film produced with Hollywood money and starring an A-list star since Eyes Wide Shut. It demands repeat viewings, and as such, it’ll either be a massive commercial failure, or it’ll touch off a new wave of American cinephilia. I guess it’s clear which option I’m rooting for.