Brimstone

Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone, in competition at Venezia 73, had the promising premise of being a Western told from the female perspective, something that has hardly been done before.

Starring Dakota Fanning in the role of Liz, the film follows her intricate life in the West and the threatening presence of a preacher interpreted by Guy Pearce. Liz lives with her husband, his son and their daughter and she is the town’s midwife, respected and appreciated, until her past comes back to haunt her.

Despite an interesting opening, the film, divided in four chapters across 148 minutes, falls into major flaws. The script is its main problem, overusing a redundant, and often unnecessary, violence and leaving plotlines unsolved. It also introduces characters that have no space within the main narrative arch, thus adding gratuitous scenes for the sake of enriching an already heavy narrative.

However, what should have been the film’s strength, the female point of view, as said above, creates problems rather than resolving issues around femininity in the western genre. Dakota Fanning gives a great performance as a character who interestingly combines the tropes of the domestic woman and the prostitute, two staples of the genre, but the film’s progression only make her narrative fall back into the tragedy of the female protagonist.

Film scholarship has widely focused on the topic, noticing that when a film is entirely based on a woman’s story it either confines her to a romantic domesticity, or it transforms her into a tragic character only destined to suffer. In a classic western, let’s take John Ford as director and John Wayne as the cowboy par excellence, Wayne’s characters are mostly solitary and tormented, but they hardly turn into tragic as they are usually granted an ending triumph.

Finally, the actors’ performances manage to hold the film together, with Emilia Jones interpreting an impressive young Liz. That said, Brimstone fails in retelling a masculine genre without giving the same chance to its female protagonist, because when John Wayne walks out of the door of domesticity, he jumps on his horse and leaves for the wilderness, he is given that choice.