Jane Got a Gun is being sold as a rousing feminist Western although the truth is that it’s about as rousing and feminist as my cat, Daphne, who is 17, and now barely moves but who, back in the day, made herself available to every passing Tom. So you don’t look at Daphne and think ‘rousing feminist’, just as you don’t come away from this film and think ‘rousing feminism’ — assuming you are minded to think anything at all, and haven’t just been bored to death.
Produced by Natalie Portman, who also stars, the film has had its troubles. The interesting art-house auteur Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ratcatcher) was meant to direct but on the first day of filming she failed to turn up, which was mightily inconsiderate, but perhaps she’d read the script by then. So Ramsay bolted, which caused Bradley Cooper to also bolt, who was, in any case, a replacement for Jude Law, who had previously bolted. A substitute director, Gavin O’Connor (Warrior, Pride and Glory), was drafted in, along with Ewan McGregor to replace the Bradley Cooper that had been Jude Law. However, such difficulties need not be definitive. Harvey Keitel was fired from Apocalypse Now six weeks into filming, and speedily substituted with Martin Sheen, for example. So troubled productions can become great films, but this troubled production is not one of them.
This is storytelling at its most pedestrian. It’s set in the New Mexico Territory, 1871, but with flashbacks taking us, for instance, to Missouri, 1864, which the caption informs us is ‘seven years earlier’ — helpful if basic mental arithmetic is not your thing, or you are four. Portman plays Jane, who is holed up on her homestead when her husband, Bill (Noah Emmerich, who was probably a replacement for someone or other who bolted), trucks up on his horse.
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