Jane Got a Gun (2015)

I’m compelled to write about this movie for several reasons. First is, of course, the simple fact that I enjoy it so much myself, as well as the fact that the movie hasn’t received enough exposure, combined with the fact that I feel it has gotten too many unfair negative reviews. Enjoyment is subjective and there is always a necessary allowance for different spectrums, but at the same time, some assessments just defy logic.

In a time when westerns are not the hip thing the way they once were, I am always eager to support something that forwards the genre and attempts to keep it at least somewhat relevant. Through the many, many struggles of this films production Natalie Portman held tight to get it completed. Directors bailed, and likewise the lead actors who had signed on the project in order to work with said bailing directors. Eventually Portman was helped out by good friends and previous collaborators Ewan McGregor and Joel Edgerton. Portman had reached out to Ewan McGregor and asked him to come on board to help her get it finished, which he agreed to, and that sort of camaraderie and dedication to getting a quality Western made deserves, at least, fair consideration.

One of the consequences for the films labored production was that the studio dumped it in January, (where they offload any projects considered to be lesser) and it received very little promotion, giving it the impression that if the studio didn’t care much about, then why should audiences? One interesting side note is that it’s domestic theater release was handled by The Weinstein Company. Is it possible Natalie Portman refused to do Fat Harvey certain favors in order to get favorable treatment for her movie? Considering what Salma Hayek had to do for her movie, it wouldn’t surprise me. But none-the-less, the movie was not so much put out as left out like a late dinner left on the counter when you’re tired and want to go to bed; none of this reflecting the actual quality of the movie.

Portman portrays Jane Hammond, a possible mash-up of two previous characters she has played (Jane Foster in Thor and Evey Hammond in V For Vendetta). Her husband has come home shot up and it’s only a matter of time until the men who did it track him to where he and Jane live. To this point we have a fairly standard western dilemma set up, but this is where the movie excels, even though some feel it loses it’s way. The movie isn’t about the big showdown at the end, and this is why some criticize it as being uneven or of getting lost. It was never meant to be about the showdown; this is a woman’s story about having to survive in the meanness of the western frontier. In order to enjoy this movie it needs to be remembered that this is not a traditional western shoot ‘em up; it’s a western drama set against the backdrop of common western feuds.

What takes this movie in it’s own unique direction is that instead of focusing on how Jane’s husband is going to become a one-man A-Team and take down the oncoming bad guys, it focuses on a woman caught up in the midst of these men and their anger. And in the middle of it all she has to do her best to survive, and hopefully keep her husband alive, as well. Along the way we get more and more context, learning about Jane, her relationship with her husband, as well as Joel Edgerton’s character, who just so happens to be the “gun” that Jane is trying to get. This unfolding narrative is what I love in a western: people dealing with circumstances that are essentially unique to their time. Many of the struggles that people face today are not the same as the struggles that people faced 150 years ago.

There’s been a lot of pain and hurt, including loss, getting to where they are, and in spite of all that trouble they’ve got to deal with where life has brought them as people; even without the ones they’ve lost. Ultimately the culmination is not in the concern of whether they will physically survive the moment, but who they will be when it’s all done, and what choices will be made.

 

I’m being careful not to say anything that could be considered a spoiler, so this write up may seem vague at times, but I’d rather that than ruin anything. Definitely see it for yourself and I really believe you’ll have a great experience.

Wild Bill (1996)

Wild Bill starring Jeff Bridges is both a movie you have to see, as well as a movie you probably ought to turn off about half way through. Bridges is fantastic as Wild Bill. Admitting that it’s impossible to know exactly what a man was like in real life who lived so long ago, for my dollar Bridges comes as close as anyone who’s ever been on screen. His confidence, his tone, demeanor, his stride and stance, all convey to me exactly the image I get when I read about the real man.

The movie gets off to a good start, depicting Wild Bill on the range, and briskly moves through many of his more acclaimed moments. The problem comes when the script suddenly goes sideways and becomes all about a lost love who has an avenger in the name of Jack McCall, who hunts down Hickok and, unable to finish off the man himself, hires a gang of gunslingers to harass and essentially kidnap Bill and his friends.

It is true that no one knows exactly who Jack McCall was or why he hated Wild Bill Hickok, and therefore a little bit of artistic license should be allowed when presenting some conjecture on this part of the story. Unfortunately, the route taken goes so far off course, taking the rest of the story with it, that it corrupts the whole timeline of Wild Bill, and by the end of the movie it’s sort of a psychedelic mess (yes, psychedelic).

Aside from the gunplay and the strangeness of the relationship theories, there is also some thoughtful time given to Wild Bill’s time as a performer, as well as to his deteriorating state in his latter years. The moments are relatively succinct, which is appropriate for a movie covering the entirety of a life rather than one aspect of it, but it brings enough to the audience to create sincere sympathy, and in a compact way, give a good snapshot of the man.

I think it best to watch the movie completely through the first time it’s viewed, but for me, whenever I choose to re-watch it, I press the clicker before it gets too weird. It’s too bad it’s such a schizophrenic creature, because it is easily the best depiction of Hickok and many of his gunfights that we have to date. Perhaps with some luck we’ll get a newer version that can improve on the positives of this one.

Homesman, The (2014)

Caution: this post is rife with spoilers for the movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly suggest you watch it first, and then read this. I’ve love to hear what people think.

Normally it’s my intention to avoid overly pontificating over the highs and lows of a films quality, or to try to get wrapped up in pretentious presentation in a thinly veiled move to show people I know more about movies than them. I don’t enjoy people who talk or act that way, and it’s not a behavior I hope to be known for. But with the Homesman I do want to break a bit from my more casual approach of discussing movies, and offer an actual breakdown of what I got out of this great film.

There are a lot of reasons for considering the Homesman to be a great western. Items and details such as the language (particularly the swearing by Tommy Lee Jones when he curses the hotel owner), the weapons, even the paper town of Fairfield where the hotel is located, all lend to an accurate view of the era. The paradox of this is that due to a lot of these great elements people walk away enjoying it, in spite of the fact that many are confused by what they saw, or what the point of it all was.

I can’t speak for others, and I’m not the type to tell you how to feel, but I hope that my breakdown opens up some thoughts on how to receive this story.

So why do people get confused? First off, the movie was highly touted as a feminist western, but given that the movie is about women gone crazy because of the strain, and the fourth woman, the strong one, ending up killing herself after exposing herself as weak and desperate, how can that be? Given these portrayals, in the end, you would have to wonder what happened along the way. The problem with this line of thought is that it’s not a feminist western.

It does uniquely give the female perspective, and that is worth much more than a feminist fantasy brought to life, but this female view to the times is not the crux of the story; it’s a catalyst for what is. It should be noted, however, that this insightful and thoughtful woman’s perspective is another authentic quality of the era that makes the Homesman such a good movie.

Another point that I’ve heard made is that after switching focus from the female lead to the male (from Swank to Jones), people are confused as to what the point of Tommy Lee Jones’ journey was other than to maybe feel good about his eventual kind gestures.

What I have gotten out of this movie is that it is a tale of the western frontier, and of the times, through the embodiment of one central male figure. It is the story of the western man who survived the west, but came and went with the progress of days. Who had only a single moment in time that he was in his right place, and that time and place didn’t last long. Which, incidentally, I also believe is why westerns are loved so much.

Initially we’re introduced to Mary Bee Cuddy (Swank) and are set up to sympathize with her situation. It’s an impressive thing she offers to do and she’s easy to get on board with, but then she meets George Briggs and things are getting ready to shift. I believe that shift came once she asks him his name. He’s introduced to the audience as just a shifty drifter, possibly a good guy, possibly a bad guy; yes, he may have claim jumped, but beyond that he’s just a western character drifting in to the lives of those already established.

When Mary asks him what his name is he thinks up a name and offers George Briggs. He laughs as he says it, amused, and it clearly doesn’t mean a lot to him. But this is something I’ll come back to.

I’m going to revisit those previous obstacles but first consider his arrival to Iowa. The purpose of this trip was to get these women back to where they can be cared for, and where is that? Back in civilization because the west was too tough. After all that George has been through  he has finally made it to civilization. He delivers the women, buys new clothes, and even a nice tombstone for Mary Bee Cuddy. The regard the women were given by the ministers wife immediately counters the attitude shown by the one offered on the frontier. In the foyer he wants to tell of the hardship, but the cultured, caring woman asks him to please not speak of it. George Briggs is out of place here.

Bodies of water are often used to symbolize a rebirth or a purification. After all that they had been through, George Briggs was a new person. He began to care, and he wanted good things for people. In civilized Iowa he attempted to participate; it didn’t go well. The parsons wife was very polite, but once business was conducted she tells Briggs he can go now. After five grueling weeks it was all over, just like that. He went and got nicely dressed and attempted to sit in on a game of poker but was told his money was no good. Symbolically speaking, the vouchers of value that he earned on the frontier were told to be of no value. Then in clear language, he was told he was not welcome to sit in at the game. Western men are known for coming into town and sitting in at a game of cards. But in this civilization across the river, there wasn’t a seat for him, and his frontier money was literally no good. He had no value to them.

George Briggs learned to care about the women he was transporting, he had even tried once to cross a river, but he was followed by the women and had to turn back to help them. In short, he had left them behind, and couldn’t cross that river yet; the time for a crossing was still to come.

Once in the city he attempted to be respectable through dress and social engagement, and he even worked to bring dignity to the memory of Mary Cuddy by purchasing a tombstone, as well as buying shoes for a young lady and warning her of the frontier. But ultimately, having no luck, he gets drunk and boards a ferry back across the river. In keeping with the theme of water being the rebirth, he had been through it, and now returned to where he came from. The tombstone gets kicked off the ferry and floats down river, symbolizing all memory of Mary Bee Cuddy lost, and any attempt to record her struggle in life to be given up.

So as I said, the name George Briggs was not his real name. Like so many western characters that moved from one town to another they adopted a name to get by on. George Briggs wasn’t a real man, he was a symbol of all the men who came and went in the west, and could have never survived anywhere but the west. He gave a name that suited his situation, and then he encountered Indians, but survived, representing the trials of the earlier western men. Next he came upon a desperate character who would be ornery and fight for what he wanted with little regard for what anyone else wanted; this represented the proliferation of gun men on the range after the end of the civil war and the confinement of the Native Americans to reservations. He overcame that, too. Finally, he comes to a small hotel in the middle of nowhere. This represents the beginning of the end of the western character. Incredulously, these men of business have either no understanding of the code of the west, or they have no use for it, or probably even both. It was known on the frontier that when a stranger came to your door you gave them a meal, and if needed, a place to sleep. Here with this hotel were new ways of doing things, ways that were primarily concerned with a bottom-line benefit.

George Briggs couldn’t abide this; he represented a time and code that didn’t allow such un-neighborly behavior and so he cursed them (in period accurate swears) and then burned down their hotel. A purging fire to preserve his land.

Everything up to the initial ferry crossing at the river served to show who George Briggs was and what his world was about; fighting Indians, surviving desperate characters, not tolerating inhospitable eastern money-first ways; all these elements that prevailed against his life. He was able to overcome them all, but he could not overcome the one thing that lay just across the river, and that was civilization. It was only a matter of time before even that crossed into the west and George Briggs was no longer a welcome man anywhere. He left civilization, re-crossing the river, returning to what he knew, while firing shots at the city behind him, showing his contempt for their world. He would go out dancing and singing, embracing his time. And Mary Cuddy’s tombstone was let go of, drifting away. In the city he tried to be a different man, but returning to the frontier he would be what he really was, and it was the only time or place that he could have been who he was. George Briggs was the western character that disappeared towards the end of the 19th century.

Forsaken (2015)

This movie is a little incomplete, and by that I mean literally; it’s not got all it’s parts pulled together. What could have possibly been a great movie ends up being a decent movie, and barely even that. Really it’s just a movie, neither good nor bad, that has some good stuff to it. If only it had been allowed to reach it’s potential.

Kiefer Sutherland is the wayward son who has come home, carrying a reputation as an effective gunman. His father in the movie is played by his father in real life, Donald Sutherland, and in the movie he’s a bit of a sanctimonious, hard-nosed man. So when his son comes home he expects trouble.

Trouble comes in a couple of different forms, but mostly this is where the trouble for this movie starts to rear it’s head. There’s the classic bad guy causing trouble, but then there’s the hired gun for said bad guy. He and John Henry Clayton (Kiefer Sutherland) seem to have a connection as brothers-of-the-gun, if you will, and are not eager to engage each other in a showdown. But here’s the problem: what looks to be the most promising element of this would-be-moody film gets passed over in order to keep the movie as cookie cutter as the studio bosses see fit.

At the film’s completion I had guessed there must have been a doozy of a pile of film on the cutting room floor, and from what I’ve read, that seems about right. Apparently the original film was timed at around three hours, but the powers-that-be, in all their Hollywood wisdom, decided the movie would be better and an hour and a half, and therefor removed everything that would make the movie interesting. It’s a terrible shame, too, because it looked as if it might have been building up to be a little something in the vein of 1995’s Heat with Deniro and Pacino. Do I think at three hours they would have pulled it off? No, a movie like Heat is a rarity, but a western done in that vein, with the dichotomy of two like rivals could still have been a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, Gentleman Dave Turner (Michael Wincott, the rival gunfighter) pretty much slips out of the movie immediately after his set up, and then returns just enough at the end to look cool.

I really think the writer of this film knows his western stuff, I just think the producers wanted to make the safest formula-film they could. It’s worth a watch, but if anything it’ll probably leave you wandering what was left out that you didn’t get to see.

John Henry Clayton pulls his guns and demands the editors include the extra hour plus that would have made this movie great…!

Gunless (2010)

Canadian politeness meets grizzled American west

I expected to enjoy this movie based on the person who referred it to me, but I was surprised at both how much I enjoyed it, as well as how I enjoyed it. Paul Gross does a great job in the lead as a caricature of the hard-ridden desert gunslinger who lives his life on the edge of a gunfight. Ironically, he’s ended up in a quaint little Canadian town that’s never had one; a gunfight, nor a gunfighter.

They all take to their newly arrived hard edged gunman and see him more as a realization of contemporary celebrity than as a dangerous element in their serene little town. This is the point where most of the humor comes from. I doubt that this is very many people’s cup of tea, but I do hope that it’ll be given a chance by anyone who’s on the fence.

Keep in mind this is only a B western, and a Canadian produced one at that, so it’s not got the same feel as the typical Hollywood western, but sometimes a different perspective is a great way to look at something you’ve been looking at the same way for a very long time. However, it’s not to say that this is a jarring departure from familiar western standards; it’s more in the subtleties and sensibilities.

Some standout items, for me, were the blacksmith who doesn’t want to be involved in a gunfight. Tyler Mane does a good job staying appropriately tough, but on the flip side, somewhat reserved and peaceable; just not so much as to be an over the top aw-shucks-softy. His performance was one of the better connections, and his blacksmith felt like a real person.

For humor, the discussion in the school house, about what constitutes a weapon, was great. It was just self-referential enough, and had just enough tone of being a real, contemporaneous discussion between the locals of the town. And that’s what made this movie work for me: it was all about juxtaposition. How one thought or attitude compared when set against a differing backdrop than the usual.

I say again that I know it won’t be everyone’s kind of movie, but if you want something a little different, then definitely give it a try. It’s a comedy, drama, six-gun movie that doesn’t lean too hard on any one genre designation.

Young Guns (1988)

Young Guns will draw a lot of different reactions. It was really a pretty popular movie, yet anyone who has studied the true events of Billy the Kid and the Regulators will be quick to express their chagrin at all the inaccuracies. Lucky for me this movie came out when I was still too young and too uneducated on the west to be bothered by any of it. And since ignorance is bliss, it has remained an all time favorite of mine.

I don’t deny the movies mistakes, sure it has plenty, but even now, after having read books a plenty on Billy the Kid, I still think it does an ok job. For having to try and cram so much story in to two hours of screen time, I think they did an overall good job of condensing events and putting across broad points in concise moments.

Granted, Young Guns should probably win an award for the most occurrences of dramatic gun-cocking in a western…ever, but for a young guy like me, I thought it was pretty darn slick; the scene of taking turns cocking their guns and then posing in the barn before storming out is probably a highpoint in western cheese, but man did I think that was cool. And just as well, there are plenty of genuinely quality scenes.

Billy and the guys all camped out and deciding what they were going to do next is a generally true event. Some decided to ride away, some decided to stay, with Billy leading the contingent choosing to remain. Likewise, although the time is sped along, Frank Coe tells a story of Tunstall taking Billy to town and buying him a new suit and guns and gunbelt and how happy Billy was about it. He said it was the first time anyone had done anything like that for him, so those little touches in the movie are a real plus.

Of course the not-so-subtle moments are pretty great, too, like the scene with Morton and Baker and McCloskey. No one alive knows for sure what happened on that backtrail to Lincoln, but this scene is a great depiction of what most likely occurred.

I would really love to see Billy’s life played out over the course of a three or four part series of movies, or even TV movies, but in the meantime, Young Guns is still a pretty fun way to take in a visualized depiction, in spite of some cheese.

Tombstone (1993)

Let’s all say it together: I’m you’re Huckleberry

Ok, now with that out of the way we can begin…

It’s been almost twenty-five years since Tombstone’s release and still it remains as an oft-quoted piece of easily recognizable Americana. It’s hard to find a person who even moderately enjoys westerns and hasn’t already seen the movie, so I don’t see any need to offer a review and critique, but instead, let’s just talk about it.

Tombstone was the first major movie to get mustaches right! This is a huge thing for me. As much as I love the old classics, and the old TV shows, I can never get past how clean shaven and pretty everyone was. Tombstone unapologetically hoisted upon the un-expecting American movie-going public a whole cast of men with testosterone laced sweeping ‘staches. And upper-lip coiffing was only the beginning. From this bold point the creators set forth to bring us one of the most accurate historical westerns we’ve seen.

True, some will highlight this or that element that isn’t accurate, but movie makers have to be allowed to be succinct in pulling together certain moments in order to get the point across when the alternative is to leave significant elements out altogether. But the amount of things that Tombstone gets right overrides any petty nitpicking of details that the average movie goers wouldn’t be aware of, anyway. Probably the only way to be able to get more accurately detailed would be if they were to make a week long mini-series of the whole ordeal; which would be a welcome endeavor, to my way of thinking.

Tombstone is the western for a generation. In the late 60’s Clint Eastwood teamed with Sergio Leone and re-presented westerns, changing people’s attitudes for a whole generation. Until Tombstone came along Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns were considered template of what westerns had come to mean for the world at large. But Tombstone came along and did the same thing, changing people’s notions of what westerns should look like, and their characters should act.

People like Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo illuminated a truth about the gambling, gun-slinging men of those wild days. Wyatt and Virgil and Morgan gave us a real insight to what lawing was really like, and the challenges facing a society working hard to establish itself. Yes, these elements have been done before in westerns, but never with the accuracy and sleek style of Tombstone. It’s mix of history lessons with cool appeal imbedded itself in the minds of American consciousness.

Now, nearly twenty-five years since it’s original release, we can hope that someone is yet again up to the challenge and present us with another cinematic marvel that embodies all that Americans have loved about westerns, and define it for this generation, giving new viewers a reason to be awed by the west and the men and women who lived it.