Jane Got a Gun (2016) **/*****

Throughout the 90s and the aughts, so few people were making Westerns and so few Westerns that got made were any good that it felt like the genre was dying. There were some rumblings of a resurgence back in 2010 when the Coen brothers made a bunch of money and got a bunch of critical acclaim with their True Grit remake though—and with the release of Slow West, Bone Tomahawk, and The Hateful Eight last year (which were all awesome to varying degrees), it started to look like we were on the verge of a full-on Western renaissance. Maybe those films raising expectations is why Jane Got a Gun feels like such a disappointment. Conversely, maybe the lowered expectations the genre came with for so long is why it also feels like Jane Got a Gun should be given a pass for being such a disappointment. Either way you cut it though, the sad truth is that, like most movies that get released in January, Jane Got a Gun has a lot of problems.

The film opens with a man (Noah Emmerich) returning home to his wife and child and their isolated ranch with a small handful of bullets in his body, dying. That’s not the worst of his situation though. The worst is that the bullets were put in him because he crossed a powerful gang of outlaws, the sort of gang who isn’t going to be happy with just seriously injuring an enemy, so now they’re on his trail, they aim on finishing the job of murdering him, and they’ll likely also take care of the wife and the kid when they get there. The wife is Jane (Natalie Portman), and given the fact that her husband has been incapacitated, it falls on her to protect her home and her family. The twist there is that the only gunslinger she knows who might help her is her ex-fiancé (Joel Edgerton). He answers her call, begrudgingly, but once he’s in the house of his former love and her new husband, bad feelings begin to bubble to the surface. Add that to the ticking clock element of the gang of outlaws on their way to wreak havoc, and this doesn’t turn out to be a good situation for anyone. 

Slow West (2015) ****/*****

The movie Western has been ubiquitous for decades now. Even during the down points of the ebb and flow of the genre’s popularity, there have always been at least a couple movies about hard, gun-wielding men trying to make their way in the American frontier that have come out every year. Combine the vast quantities of Westerns with the relative sameness of all of their content—they’re generally all gritty-toned morality tales that feature shots of wide open vistas—and the prospect of sitting through yet another Western can begin to sound like an exercise in pointlessness, or even a chore. That’s why it’s so danged refreshing whenever somebody comes along and actually manages to do something different with the genre like writer/director John Maclean has with his first feature, Slow West.

The film sees Kodi Smit-McPhee (Let Me In, Paranorman) playing a naive young Scottish preppy traveling across the Colorado territory in the late 19th century in order to search for the girl who he’s in love with (Caren Pistorius). There are a couple problems with that. The first is the fact that he’s completely unsuited for survival in the American west, and the second is that, unbeknownst to him, the girl is wanted for murder, dead or alive, so all of the vicious, cutthroat bounty hunters in the region are also on her trail. Help with these problems comes in the form of a mysterious but capable frontiersman who offers to serve as his guide (Michael Fassbender), but further complications come in the form of the leader of a band of grimy bounty hunters (Ben Mendelsohn) who are looking to bag the girl (probably dead) and collect on her bounty.

Django Unchained (2012) ****/*****

Quentin Tarantino is the sort of director who’s been around long enough and put out enough impactful work that it starts to feel necessary to think about where each new movie he makes stands in his overall oeuvre. So you can understand where I’m coming from, I’ll briefly address what my own feelings on each of his movies have been. Reservoir Dogs hasn’t aged well over the years, but at the time it came out it was a ballsy, attention-grabbing film that really announced to the world that Tarantino was a director to watch. Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, those are the masterpieces and the best molding of style and substance that he’s produced to this point. After that the guy’s work got a little bit too masturbatory for me, and started to feel like an empty excuse to indulge in his childhood fetishes (I’m talking movies here, not women’s feet). Kill Bill and Death Proof are movies that exist to showcase style alone and are not my favorites. With Inglorious Basterds he made a bit of a comeback. Here there was some drama and storytelling to go along with the genre flourishes. While I’m not crazy about how the film comes together as a whole, it contains at least two scenes that are incredible cinematic achievements.

So where does that put his new release, Django Unchained? This is a film that sees him continuing the good work he got back to in Basterds, and taking it to another level. It features a melding of kitschy filmmaking techniques with a human story that affects you on an emotional level, and it’s definitely the best overall film he’s made since Jackie Brown. Django is an homage to the Spaghetti Western—with a flavorful dose of Blacksploitation thrown in—that tells the sort of stranger-comes-to-town-and-protects-an-innocent story that you’d expect from the Westerns of guys like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, combined with the sort of black-hero-sticks-it-to-the-white-devil story that was often featured in Blacksploitation fare like Super Fly and Black Caesar. Jamie Foxx stars as Django, a slave who is freed and trained to be a bounty hunter by an eccentric though exceptional German immigrant named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). What starts as a relationship of convenience blossoms into something more, and eventually Schultz finds himself traveling from Texas to Mississippi to help Django locate and free his wife, who turns out to be in the clutches of a sadistic slave owner by the name of Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). Unfortunately for our heroes, Candie isn’t the sort of man who gives up something he owns easily, and he and his scheming head of house, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), prove to be a duo experienced enough in evil that they’re not likely to be outsmarted. Which means Schultz and Django’s attempt to do just that ends up playing out with violent and bloody results.

Meek’s Cutoff (2011) ***/*****

When discussing various forms of art, critics often use words like “sparse” and “bleak” as if they were blanket compliments that mean something is good. I’m not so certain about the validity of that stance, but I have to admit there is some sort of intellectual satisfaction that comes from watching something that is slow and difficult, yet still captivating. It’s so much harder to get somebody’s attention with silence than it is with noise, so when somebody is able to pull that feat off it seems like you’ve seen something special. I think the impasse between my opinion and those of many others comes when deciding if something that is sparse, slow, and bleak actually does manage to be captivating. Too often I hear about a film being a stark masterpiece full of small, contemplative moments, and when I end up seeing it I find it to be little other than a pretentious snoozefest. Meek’s Cutoff is not that. It’s a slow moving film that is more full of silence than dialogue, to be sure. Its scenery could more accurately be described as rugged than it could beautiful, without question. But it’s also a film that I found interesting all of the way through. I never found myself bored or squirming in my seat while watching it. Still, I’m not sure that’s enough for a film to accomplish in order for me to give it a recommendation. Though I was always interested in the themes and allegories that Meek’s Cutoff put on the table, when I think about how I was affected by it, what it was able to stir in me, I start to view it as being a little less than impressive.

True Grit (2010) ****/*****

With their love of weaving intricate tapestries of colloquial dialogue it’s no wonder that the Coen brothers have decided to make an adaptation of a western novel.  What might be a bit surprising is the way in which they adapted the material.  They’ve adapted previously existing material before, but by hugely altering it and making it undeniably a Coen brothers movie.  For this one they’ve made an adaptation that’s arguably more faithful to the original source material than the 1969 film adaptation starring John Wayne.  This may just be the most straight, accessible film that the Coens have ever made.  But that’s not to say that this is a radical departure from what they’ve done in the past.   Nor is it a cynical attempt to make something that is pointed at a mainstream audience.  True Grit can stand next to the typical western film without making itself conspicuous as a standout in many ways, but in other, subtler ways it radically breaks from the tropes of the genre.  This is a very talky film, the first act especially.  In many ways the trading of dialogue among the main characters is the main attraction.  There’s not a whole lot of action here.  Sure, there are a couple of gunfights, but they’re not the focus of what is happening.  The cinematography is undeniably beautiful, but not in the same showy, “look at these wide open spaces” way that most westerns are.  Roger Deakins, the Coens’ usual director of photography shoots the film, and he already did that type of stuff perfectly in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  The action here takes place in small shacks, in caves, in dense forests.  This is a more intimate, personal story than you get in most westerns.  The music isn’t the usual gallopy, knock two halves of a coconut together to reproduce the sound of horse hooves score that appears in traditional westerns.  The Coens’ usual musical collaborator Carter Burwell creates the score of the film by repeating the strains of an old hymnal called ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’.  The complete song is played over the end credits.  So all the hallmarks of a typical Coen brothers film are all there; all of the usual collaborators are in place.  But what they’ve made here, your parents just might like too.