Jane Got a Gun was first described to me (by a man) as a “feminist western”, a notion that got me excited and curious right away. What did they mean by “feminist western”? Was it written and directed by women? Did it cleverly subvert and comment on the variegated female character tropes of traditional westerns, such as tragic brothel employee, bawdy brothel employee, brothel employee who is just OK with it, brothel employee giggling on a balcony, brothel employee behind a fan while men play cards, brothel employee being watched through a peephole and loving it, and Wyatt Earp’s wife? Did it strive to fill in the blanks about all the women missing from traditional westerns – the negative space around male heroes – their stories rendered invisible by histories and genre fiction written largely by men? I like westerns and I love feminism, so even if Jane Got a Gun was just 110 minutes of public breastfeeding near a cactus, I would take it.

Jane Got a Gun review – laborious and solemn western with absurd finale Read more

Jane Got a Gun is an adequate, conventional western. The performances are good. The writing is fine. I don’t know why you’d watch it when you could watch, say, Deadwood (which, incidentally, has some arguably masterful feminist characters), but if you eat, sleep, and breathe horse troughs and saloon doors and beard grime, it’ll scratch that itch.

Natalie Portman is Jane, a grizzled-but-don’t-worry-still-hot frontierswoman homesteading in the New Mexico desert with her husband, a fur trader, and their little girl, a little girl. One day her husband shows up, full of bullets, and groans that the Bishop Boys – a band of ghoulish but dimensionless outlaws led by Ewan McGregor – are coming to put a bunch more bullets in Jane and the kid because of their irrational hunger for man-revenge (hey, instead of plodding hundreds of miles through unforgiving desert waste just to kill some random mom who isn’t even doing anything to you, why not heist a few trains and retire to a place not made entirely of snakes?). To save her family, Jane does what any feminist heroine would do: she rides a horse to her ex-boyfriend’s house to beg him for protection, then brings him back home so he and her husband can spend the rest of the movie having a low-energy slap-fight about who gets to own her while they all wait for death. Much like the work of Betty Friedan.

Meanwhile, Jane’s backstory unfurls in a series of diminishingly sunny flashbacks, revealing itself to be – surprise, surprise – the ex-boyfriend’s backstory instead. He is the only character who experiences any growth, revelation or change (however minor) over the course of the film, the vehicle of his growth being horrific sexual violence enacted on Jane.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t make art about sexual violence, or that men aren’t worthwhile film subjects, or that you can’t have feminist characters in movies about men, but leveraging female trauma for male character development is not feminist storytelling. Strangely enough, in the film’s best moments, Jane seems to explicitly address this shortcoming: “You might want to see a day where the sun don’t just shine on your story,” she scolds the ex. “Because there’s a whole world out there of other people’s tales.” At this point in my life, I have heard many, many white men’s tales. I crave other people’s tales.

Jane Got a Gun – but most women in westerns still don't Read more

So, unless your criteria for what constitutes feminist media is “contains a woman”, Jane Got a Gun is hardly a new Fried Green Tomatoes. I wonder if, perhaps, that same confusion lies at the root of feminism’s branding problem. If people think that the mere presence of women evinces equality, no wonder so many young men believe feminism is a selfish, superfluous vanity project. Women are all over the place! At the shop, on the bus, modelling lingerie, bringing my dad coffee while he’s in his board meeting. Equality is achieved! What are you girls still caterwauling about?

Jane Got a Gun got me thinking about what does constitute a “feminist” movie. There certainly isn’t a single objective model – as we saw last year, even Suffragette wasn’t given a blank cheque by the feminist media – but it is clear that simply putting women on screen and letting them occasionally talk or fire a gun isn’t enough. What I look for are films that portray women the way that I know them: fully formed human beings with complex lives shaped by forces other than sexual trauma, motherhood, heterosexual love and the possessiveness of men. Films that don’t deliver such lines as: “When I finally found you, and seen you holding another man’s child, I knew you weren’t mine no more. And that did something to me that the war never could,” and expect me to read them as – ugh – romantic instead of entitled and proprietary. Films that treat every woman as a human being, whether the film-makers set out to create a “feminist” work or not.

“Feminist western” has been applied to a few films over the past decade – the dourly verite Meek’s Cutoff, the civil-war thriller The Keeping Room (which I haven’t seen), the A-list drama The Homesman and the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit – and there is clearly a tremendous vein to be mined there. The lawlessness and vulnerability of the west have always felt relatable to me as a woman. There is no escape hatch. No one is coming. It’s just you and the night and the snakes and the villains and your own wits. There are plenty of feminist westerns left to be made – Jane Got a Gun just isn’t one of them.