Jane Got a Gun

Jane Got a Gun, 2016

Directed by Gavin O’Connor, 98 minutes

Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Ewan McGregor, Noah Emmerich

Review by Katherine Scheetz

              True to its trailer, which displayed virtually no plot, Jane Got a Gun starts off with a lot of questions.

When Jane’s (Portman) husband Hamm (Emmerich) comes home littered with bullet holes and declaring that the Bishop Boys are coming for them, this inexplicably resilient woman rides off into the unrelenting New Mexico Territory to the house of sullen drunkard Dan (Edgerton) to get help. With so much action right out of the gate we have no reason to give a cow-pie for any of the characters.

It’s a risky, but decisive move for O’Connor, who uses predictably placed flashbacks to unfold Jane’s relations to all the key players in the story. As in classic western fashion, all the bad guys are bad and all the good guys are good, it just takes us a while to figure out who is who, because of the flashback technique. Another benefit to this model is the dimensionality it adds to Jane. Unfortunately, she and her dying husband are the only characters afforded that luxury.

The fictitious town of Lullaby, New Mexico is a classically colorful setting, with the whorehouse, butcher, saloon, gunsmith and coffin maker being the main attractions. There’s a tinkering piano that floats out the swinging doors onto the muddy strip, which compliments an unobtrusive score of trembling camp fire guitar underlain by soulful strings.

Peppered with phrases like “bone orchard” and “perdition” the script is a thesaurus of boomtown slang dropped like chaps in the local brothel. Between that and the heavy-handed attempt at making “story” a theme, very few lines stand out like Edgerton’s wry “Let us hope the Bishop Boys are all very big and fat.”

Storytelling aside, O’Connor has a few moments of visual strength against the cerulean western sky and dusty bonfire light through Jane’s bullet-ridden, one-room homestead.

But all’s well that ends well and with a merciful, Hail Mary ending, the people we eventually come to root for, all ride off into a covered-wagon sunset.

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