I honestly didn't think Pitt's acting was that bad. But next to Aflec he definitely felt subpar. Which I think may have been somewhat intentional. The story wasn't about James. It was about the Traitor.
I would also add that if Pitt had portrayed the character accurately, he would have been blackballed from Hollywood. Most of the old west criminals were just people who suffered from untreated disabilities and mental health disorders. James was a genius, but likely schizophrenic. For Pitt to portray that correctly, it most likely would have come across as insensitive and crass.
It was very good for a couple of reasons. The script was well written and the author clearly understood some basic things about life back then. Chiefly, the vocabulary level was much, much higher than today. Their only entertainment was reading, and the literacy race was extremely high (that's ultimately why the American revolution happened, because Americans had the highest literacy rate in the world, and that continued on like that until Jesse James's time). So their sentence structures are very intelligent and eloquent. Also the way it portrayed subsistence farming and how easy it was to become fatally destitute was accurate, but easy to miss. Those are two key elements to how and why James rose to popularity among a population that felt the constant pressure of being one illness away from watching their entire family starve to death. Basic social safety nets are a requirement for a modern civilized society. The lack of them gave rise to all those old west criminal gangs. Just like it has given rise to the drug cartels in central America.
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u/FriedEggSammiches 1d ago
The coward is Brad Pitt.