Jane Got A Gun

This was the supposed to be feministrevisionist Western from which Scottish director Lynne Ramsay walked away on the eve of the shoot, along with Jude Law and Michael Fassbender. Such a headline-making production issue inevitably casts a high noon shadow over the film – Ramsay marched straight off the set and on to the Cannes Jury that year (2013), and still hasn’t said a word about what happened. But the film finally arrives, still with its producer Natalie Portman in the lead role, and now with Ewan McGregor and Joel Edgerton saddling up alongside her.

It’s certainly hard to see what all the fuss was about – certainly, if Ramsay had made it, I’m sure the film would have looked and felt totally different and surely would have been several notches more interesting. And probably more feminist, too.

For, as it is, this is a pedestrian drama in which a woman, Jane Hammond (Portman), defends her homestead from a band of snaggletoothed, whisky-swilling outlaws led by McGregor’s moustachetwiddling John Bishop, after her husband ‘Ham’ (Noah Emmerich) returns home riddled with bullets.

Jane does what any woman way out West would do – hides her daughter with a handy neighbour and rides a few minutes down the valley to enlist the help of Edgerton’s loner and war veteran Dan Frost. Slowly, it emerges that this pair have a romantic history that now resurfaces as the outlaws close in and Frost hitches up his breeches to help his true love and have a few grizzled, grunting manly face-offs with Ham, the man who stole her.

As for the supposed feminism, that looks to have got shot to pieces. Jane is reliant on men and their guns for her survival and although she’s obviously got some steel of her own, there appears very little consistency in Portman’s character. She can’t even decide what hat to wear. (I liked the black one.)

I’m sure the original idea was to show how tough frontier life was for a woman, how her only economic options were working in the whorehouse or risking getting raped by outlaws or ‘Injuns’ or some such. But what a dull performance it is from Portman, too. She looks ‘mighty purty’, but, let’s be honest, she hasn’t really been good in anything since Léon. Even in Black Swan she ended up second fiddle to Mila Kunis.

Here, she’s too happy to look good under her black hat at inappropriate moments such as when she’s being shot at, and she can’t seem to get dirty enough when the rough stuff and ordeals start. It’s a bit of acting flatter than the plains.

The film, now directed by Gavin O’Connor, lacks any spark of humour or any really distinguishing features – even the extended gun battle has a confusion about it, because the geography of the ranch is never properly explained. Wait, there’s a downstairs? Now there’s a bunker? How did the Bishops get upstairs?

If Portman picking up her weapon is supposed to be the big moment of empowerment here, the film seems to forget previous Western heroines – from Doris Day’s Calamity Jane to Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Raquel Welch, Sharon Stone (The Quick And The Dead) and even those bordello Bad Girls played by Drew Barrymore and Madeleine Stowe. Portman’s feeble gunslinger doesn’t have anything on any of those women.

Jane Got A Gun, but not before she got a man or two to help her.