jane got a gun: it ought to have been a woman's movie

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2015. dir: Gavin O'Connor) The question you ask yourself almost constantly during this uninspired oater is in how many crucial ways it might have differed had Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk about Kevin, Morvern Callar) directed it, as was originally planned. The visuals would have been less traditionally pretty, there might have been longer pauses and silences, and we hopefully would have got inside the head of Jane (Natalie Portman) instead of viewing her story in a general way through the eyes of her men. (Portman's best moment, when she reacts to the news that her daughter has been murdered, is devastatingly good, but we watch it at a double remove: in flashback, and through the eyes of her future husband.) The bad guys might have owned some heft, instead of being villainous cardboard cut-outs painted in broad streaks of jet black-heartedness.

Starting with a lame-assed title, the script feels like a draft-horse compiled piecemeal by committee, sometimes plodding gamely, often barely limping so that you cringe at its agonizing hobbledness, never reaching a full canter. Everything is a revelation to everyone, like in a soap opera. Although her old fiance has lived for at least two years in the same swath of prairie, it is news to her that he tracked her halfway across the country after his release from Andersonville, as if she'd assumed they ended up so close by accident.

Swelly strings poison the score and Jane becomes the usual, ass-kicking bad girl we so often see today, but only when her traditional role is evoked: she fills her bad guy full of lead when he dares to keep her child's whereabouts from her. As in many mediocre Westerns, gunshot injuries taken by good guys tend to heal rapidly and without ill effect (she's gut-shot, a terrible wound to take, but in the next scene there's no sign of repercussion). The small details are wrong (when Joel Edgerton's Dan is shaming her over her lack of prowess firing a pistol, she proves her worth with a hunting rifle by destroying the handle of the firewood-chopping ax. In real life, that ax is worth something, and you don't use it for target practice when you can use a hunk of firewood just as easily). The ending is awful and one assumes Ramsay would have kept no truck with it: Jane and her long-estranged true love, now reconciled, head off into that Manifest Destiny called California with their pair of sweet-faced daughters (one of whom has been raised in a whorehouse but is seemingly still virgin and undamaged), a ready-made nuclear family, rich with bags of gold from bounties on the heads of the cretinous dogs they overcame in their own private war, and now ready to live the American Dream.

I do like that Edgerton is so homely. It's nice that homely men get to play romantic leads. I have a dream that one day homely women will be able to play leads, too, like they do sometimes in English movies. When they need a homely woman in Hollywood, they cast Hilary Swank and stick a pair of spectacles on her perfectly-chiselled face.