Brad Pitt: 5 Awesome Performances and 5 That Sucked

3. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Jesse James

As Pitt became older, his roles have progressed from the young buck and into alpha male territory. He€™s proved very capable too, whether playing professional furniture-flipper Billy Beane in Moneyball, the gleefully psychotic Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds or the always-eating Rusty Ryan in the Oceans series. He€™s very comfortable in own his skin, and though these roles are all undoubtedly awesome, I would argue that he€™s not really stretching himself. But then there€™s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Apart from having a bewilderingly long title, it features a compelling subversion of the alpha male persona by Pitt. He plays the eponymous Jesse James, and is never anything less than skin-crawlingly watchable as the infamous outlaw. Though Casey Affleck waltzed off with most of the plaudits for this film, I truly believe that Pitt€™s performance matches, if not surpasses it. He€™s basically playing a tortured caricature of himself, if you trade out the acting for bank robbing. James is a character consistently in anguish, always keeping a dominating air even when all authority has been stripped from him by an ever-enclosing world. This unsettling performance proves to be the rudder guiding the film, with Pitt constantly keeping a bullying demeanour of forced joviality at odds with his increasingly parlous situation. He does a great job of it, portraying a man who behind every forced smile and over-friendly manner is becoming increasingly desperate- he€™s lived far too high for far too long and has started to doubt his own not-inconsiderable hype. The audience simultaneously feels both pity and disgust for him, and this is an incredibly hard trick to pull off. Effectively, Pitt€™s entire role embodies the films musings on the cult of celebrity; that a man who was clearly capable of great deeds can quite easily succumb to egomania. He puts across this concept extremely well, wringing out most of the film€™s drama before his own inevitable and tragic conclusion. To find the pathos in a monster meandering towards their own doom is very hard feat, and it€™s a credit to Pitt€™s considerable abilities that he manages it. There€™s a reason he won the Volpi Cup for this one.