Writer-director Andrew Dominik begins his meditation on the outlaw on an interesting note. There's an initial sense of poetry as a narrator paints a portrait of James (played by an initially golden Brad Pitt) against a backdrop of beautiful shots of the old west. The images are soft and out of focus on the periphery of the frame as if to warn us that what we are about to see is not a clear-sighted recounting of the facts but rather something filtered through memory or time. In these initial moments, there's even a hint of the kind of poetry that graced Terence Malick's
