Jane Got a Gun

The 1962 John Ford film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ends with a newspaper editor opining that “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” At this point, the concept of a solemn, sepia-toned west is the mythology that demands to get debunked. In Gavin O’Connor’s laborious Jane Got a Gun, everyone and everything is brown all the time, including nearly every piece of clothing and interior décor. It doesn’t replace the legend with facts; it just replaces the legend with a different, much more boring, much more brown legend. The production was famously troubled, but you don’t need any extra-textual information to know that this is a conflicted and compromised mess. The story unfolds in a choppy flashback structure that robs the story of any momentum, there’s never a strong emotional connection to the characters and each clumsy plot dump contradicts the previous clumsy plot dump. Yes, those dumps are colored brown, too. D.B.