Legends of Western Cinema Week || Jane Got a Gun {2015}

{The Plot}

For years, Jane and Bill Hammond have been hiding from their past.  When Bill returns home one day riddled with bullets and close to death, he reveals that that past is about to catch up to them in the form of his former employer, outlaw John Bishop and his gang of thugs.  In a race against time and with her own reasons to fear Bishop's return, Jane is forced to enlist the help of a bitter ex-fiance to defend her husband and her home.

{My Thoughts}

This movie snuck up on me, y'all. 

While watching it, my feelings were relatively neutral.  It wasn't great, it wasn't terrible, it just was.  The plot was basic and (with one minor exception) predictable.  The acting was adequate but nothing to get excited over.  Still, I didn't dislike the film.  It just wasn't eliciting much of anything from me on an emotional level.  And that was fine, since I wasn't really expecting it to.

In hindsight, however, I've realized that this movie made more of an impact on me than I thought it did.

On the face of it, this is a fairly simple and straightforward story.  And when you dig a little deeper, it's still simple and straightforward.  But — in my case, at least — it also becomes disarmingly compelling as it goes.

The plot moves slowly and unobtrusively, building quietly until it explodes in one short burst toward the end.  It's true that this pace means the movie drags in parts — especially some drawn-out late-night conversations between Jane and Dan — but all that only serves to turn the focus more sharply onto the relationships that it portrays.  

It's a heavily character-driven story, and so, if the characters fall flat for you, you're most likely not going to enjoy it.  Since character/viewer chemistry is so subjective, this makes it difficult to say anything definite about the quality of the narrative as a whole.  For some, the characters will be too standard and two-dimensional to compensate for the potentially lackluster quality of the film's other elements.  For me, the characters only improve with time, and the more I think about them, the more invested in them I realize I've become. 

Is this Natalie Portman's best acting? Probably not, but she makes me want to see what happens to her anyway, and so do the rest of the cast members, and that's really all I need from this particular movie.

Overall, Hammond ends up being the most compelling character.  (We love a man who shoots his way through a brothel's clientele to save one of its victims.  Boy, do we love him.)  He brings a touch of psychological and ethical nuance to the story that the other members of the ensemble can't really provide, since the archetypal roles assigned to the rest of them are fairly straightforward. 

But that doesn't mean that they aren't also compelling, in their own right and in their own way.  The villains, for instance, are so despicable that it's more than easy to wish a prompt and violent demise on each and every one of them.  The Bishop gang is truly vile, and while I'll pretend not to spoil anything, let's just say that Stuff Does In Fact Go Down eventually, and when it does, it is Satisfying.

Jane and Dan, too, commandeer more than enough of my interest by the end; but more on that in a minute. 

As a general rule, I don't care for the flashback structure, which Jane Got a Gun employs.  However, I will acknowledge that it often works well for the Western genre.  Here, the flashbacks are mostly well-executed — in fact, those in the second act constitute some of the best parts of the movie.  The only ones that really bother me are the plaintive "lost love" montages that depict Jane and Dan's erstwhile romance.

I love "Obligatory Golden Filter on Two Lovers in Evening Wheat Field" as much as anybody, but it isn't needed here, and it distracts from the real tenderness that's present in the rest of the story by reducing it to the realm of sentimentality.  We don't need to see Jane and Dan in a random hot air balloon to grasp the weight of their lost romantic potential.  (Although it was kind of cute to see them chasing each other, I will admit.  Cheesy and formulaic, but kind of cute.)  

I understand that these sequences are included as a Narrative Technique, to illustrate the contrast between who Jane was Before and who she is After.  But the technique looks amateur and saccharine in this case, and it forms my one real, substantial gripe against the film.

However, enough of all that. 

The salient point, dear readers, is that I liked the movie.  Really liked it, in fact.  

It's not a groundbreaking or award-worthy film, but so what?  Things don't need to be exceptional to have value.  And I think Jane Got a Gun does have value, at the end of the day.  It may not be breathtaking or revolutionary, but it crafts an emotionally gripping human story that looks at some complicated human relationships and holds space for all of them. 

*SPOILERS*

In the end, I cared about these characters.  In the end, their victories made me happy. 

I was happy to see Dan and Hammond come to respect and look out for each other in the brief amount of time they had before stuff really hit the fan with the Bishops.  I was happy to see Dan lay down his armor little by little and admit, in countless wordless ways, that he still cared about Jane.  (*thinks about the "We are so close" scene and cries a bit*)  I was happy to find out that Mary was alive.  I was happy when Jane and Dan went to rescue her.  

And I was happy at the very end, when Dan sat in a covered wagon on the prairie with his arm in a sling, slowly tying up a bunch of wildflowers for Jane while their daughters waited for her.  I was happy to watch that sweet, tired family — reunited and safe and flush with some very well-earned cash — rumble off on their way to find the Pacific. 

*END OF SPOILERS*

Have you seen Jane Got a Gun?