*SPOILER ALERT*
(2017. dir: Martin Koolhoven) Hollywood is having a problem creating "the Women's Western". So far there hasn't been a successful one, unless you count Sam Raimi's ancient and giddy paean, the Quick and the Dead, which succeeds as a feminist venture only because it ignores the formality of "women's issues" and gives us a fully-formed, wonderfully flawed woman whose strengths, after great travails and temptations, triumph over her weaknesses.
Don't get me wrong: I applaud the effort as well worthwhile. Sooner or later, someone will succeed, and the world will be a better place for it. Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is a magnificent film, approaching the Western from a woman's point of view, while presenting life on the Oregon Trail as a sort of continuing apocalypse, in which women, men, and children must band together as equals in the (often frighteningly mundane) fight for survival, like an old-timey Walking Dead.
The more recent, more conscious efforts to redefine the Western saga from the woman's perspective, have so far failed. The Homesman, fascinating in both its bleak outlook and its main character (brought to life by the inimitable Hilary Swank) who is strong in her ideals, not all of which jibe with our current politically correct norms, ready to take on work harder than anyone else will do, and who ends in suicide. The movie turns out to be a man's film, after all, because it is only the male character who has the autonomy to make mistakes and live with them. Jane Got a Gun seems to have been spoiled by too many cooks in the kitchen, too much pulling of punches, and a contrived ending arrived at by disingenuous means. I like the Keeping Room, a small film which survives, without flinching or anachronism, the incredible obstacle which is Political Correctness, while telling the story of black and white women colluding without men in the southern states. It has strange turns and beautiful moments and terrible violence.
Brimstone is that insidious thing, a movie purporting to tell the story of a woman's strength while in truth revelling in her torture and death. By the end, I was convinced that this guy really wanted to make an S&M movie, giving it an Old West gloss for funding purposes. It is the portrait of a sexual sadist, a diabolical Dutch preacher (who may or may not be the actual Devil, as we see him with his throat cut and body burned at one point before he magically reappears to haunt our heroine later) played by Guy Pearce. Two generations of women in his family FIND THEIR STRENGTH IN SUICIDE, as told in dubious narration by the third-generation girl. It resembles a Victorian Gothic, in that the woman is meant to be the angel who finds her strength only in passivity. Dakota Fanning seems to specialize in these characters. In fact, there is the obligatory scene in which she overcomes and kills the beast (again!) who is bent on defiling her daughter, and she does it in an absurd moment of apparently supernatural grace (the only kind of triumph allowed a female in the old Victorian Gothic tradition). Kit Harington gives a robust try at the Almost-Knight-in-Dubious-Armor, he who almost saves the girl, almost provides a love interest, but ends up a non-character. The whole thing is interesting, with some lovely story-telling turns, good visuals, interesting editing and back-and-forth in time, so it's a shame one feels ripped off in the end.
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