These titles prove that 2015 was a great year for Westerns, one of the most tried and true genres of American film, and one that seems to be in perpetual need of resurrecting. I love a good Western, assuming that it has a worthwhile story to tell or at least some impressive aesthetic value. Jane Got a Gun has been sitting in limbo for years, with an unproduced screenplay that finally was made by Relativity Media right before they went bankrupt. It got passed on to the Weinstein Company who set it for a February 2015 release, only to push it back a year. After all that, we got to see the darn thing last week and, well, let’s just say that eight days later I had to dig around the internet for plot information.
Oh, yeah. Jane Hammond (Natalie Portman) has settled down with her husband Bill (Noah Emmerich) to keep a farm and raise a daughter after undergoing years of unflattering survival in the Old West. Well, one day ol’ Bill comes home full of bullets and informs his wife that the Bishop Boys gang (led by Ewan McGregor) are on the look-out for her. So, Bill being incapacitated as he is, Jane calls on her ex-lover Dan (Joel Edgerton) to help protect the homestead. Suddenly all the struggles of her former life, including the torment of losing a child, are staring poor Jane in the face, and she must come to terms with and put and end to her past once and for all.
The screenplay by Brian Duffield, Joel Edgerton, and Anthony Tambakis, based on a story by Duffield, is a curious thing. What I just told you is slightly less than all the information we receive during the entire film, so there’s really not a ton going on narratively, yet it’s kind of hard to keep altogether straight because of the movie’s way of jumping around in time without warning. Because the story is so straight-forward, it’s somewhat frustrating to have to keep leaving it to flashback to former subplots that we thought we were done with. Maybe the idea was to keep things as exciting as possible considering we’re spending most of the picture watching the characters waiting for something to happen.
The time-hopping is only a little obnoxious, especially compared to how dull the overall style is. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a story taking its time, so long as that time is spent on some sort of development, whether it be that of the characters or tension or something. Director Gavin O’Connor seems to think that everything speaks for itself just fine, and gives us nothing deeper than, “Here’s the good guys. Here’s the bad guys. Here’s what happens. The end.”
Jane Got a Gun is the kind of Western people who don’t like Westerns will see as proof that they hold the right opinion. And for people who do like the genre, it’s fine. It begins and ends and just is, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are far more satisfying movies that deserve your time. Just refer to the top of this review.
C
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