The 2002 James Coburn Vehicle American Gun is a Promising Character Study of Grief Ruined by an Idiotic Twist Ending
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One of the many things that I have come to admire about Virginia Madsen over the course of watching and writing about all of her movies for this column is the effortless conviction she brings to every role she plays.
It doesn’t matter whether she’s playing a space princess, a beautiful musician lusted after by a sexy nerd and a sentient computer or the personification of death: we inherently believe she is whoever she is supposed to be.
The same was true of the great James Coburn. He was one of the gifted few who never seemed to be acting. He brought a muscular authenticity to the roles he played over the course of a long and legendary career.
It is consequently unfortunate when two actors who seldom, if ever, hit a bum note or feel inauthentic are stuck in a film that starts out slow and steady but is a raging hurricane of convoluted phoniness by the end.
American Gun is afflicted with a twist ending so insulting and preposterous that it made me want to shoot my television in aggravation, Elvis-style.
But before the movie flies deliriously off the rails it gets off to a promising and meticulous start. In his groovy 1960s and 1970s heyday Coburn was just about the coolest guy on the planet. He was hip and happening, a mountain of a man with a voice like whiskey and wood.
By the time Coburn made American Gun, however, he was an old man. This was his last film and while he could deservedly feel proud of his fine performance the filmmakers fail him, fail Madsen and fail the audience.
In American Gun Coburn plays Martin Tillman, the least hip man alive. He’s worked at a factory for thirty-six years and has devoted his life to being a good husband to wife Anne (Barbara Bain), father to Penny (Madsen) and grandfather to Penny’s troubled daughter Mia (Alexandra Holden).
Martin is introduced unironically buying his wife the single ugliest Christmas sweater in existence. He has a complicated but loving relationship with his daughter, who has made more than her share of mistakes and suffered the consequences.
Penny’s daughter has run away and she lacks the resources to track her down and the father does not seem to be in the picture in any meaningful way.
Martin’s world is devastated when Penny is killed with a gun. He’s distraught. He’s overwhelmed. He has the kind of deep, debilitating depression that makes it hard to get out of bed every morning.
Anne falls into a similarly deep, dark depression but she has the additional guilt of having passive-aggressively shamed Penny for losing track of her daughter the last time that they spoke.
To its credit American Gun lets Martin experience the agony of losing a child in all of its horror and emotional devastation. As a father of two I cannot imagine a fate worse than having to bury one of your children.
As a character study about the soul-consuming nature of grief American Gun has a certain understated power rooted entirely in Coburn and Madsen’s performances. If the film had remained a movie about mourning it would be incredibly depressing and aggressively non-commercial but writer-director Alan Jacobs takes it in a surprising and ultimately deeply unfortunate direction.
Martin wants to channel his despair into something productive and useful. So while his wife goes back to work he takes a leave of absence from his job so that he trace back the history of the gun that was used to kill his daughter.
He discovers that the gun had previously been owned by pretty much everyone. You might think I’m exaggerating but apparently I owned the gun briefly sometime around 1996 because there’s a flashback of me buying it and then using it in a liquor store robbery. I have no memory of that but it must have happened because it’s in the movie.
The hero is ostensibly learning the long, complicated, and murder-filled history of the gun that destroyed his life and his family’s life so that he can solve the murder and bring the guilty party to justice.
But American Gun suffers from such a weird lack of tension and stakes that it also feels like he’s an old man in need of a hobby to distract him from his grief so he chose to research a murder weapon with quite the history.
As a procedural American Gun is decidedly on the sleepy and shapeless side. To cite a particularly egregious example of the film’s frustrated storytelling at one point Martin learns that the gun pretty much went AWOL for a good two year period and consequently could have been used by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.
To further help him process his grief Martin writes his dead daughter letters about his life and her daughter and his quest to learn the truth about her killing or at least pick up lots of information of varying degrees of usefulness.
Martin eventually tracks down his granddaughter though he does not initially tell her that her mother is dead. Throughout American Gun we get flashbacks to the family’s fraught history.
Two other actors play Coburn’s character at different points in his life but at one point Madsen plays herself as a high school senior. A high school senior! Madsen an extraordinarily beautiful women who has aged very well but she was in her forties when she made American Gun and no one in their forties should be playing a teenager unless it is for comic effect.
We get a lot of flashbacks, including black and white images of Coburn fighting in World War II but these flashbacks don’t add anything. Instead they distract from the emotional core of the movie, which is Martin and Penny’s relationship and the father’s grief over his daughter’s passing.
If you do not want the ending of an obscure movie you’re NEVER going to watch spoiled then stop reading now.
In the big, dumb twist we learn the identity of the murderer and it is (DRUM ROLL) Martin! That’s right. Our hero is the killer! Oh sure we saw Penny get killed during a robbery by someone who is most assuredly her elderly dad but that turned out to be a fake-out.
In reality Penny was putting a present under the Christmas tree and her father mistook her for a burglar and pumped her full of lead. He couldn’t handle the guilt or the shame so he must have blocked out the murder just to be able to live with himself.
The idiotic twist feels like a violation of a first act that treats grief honestly and sensitively. It’s a shame that Coburn’s final film had to be gimmicky nonsense but that has nothing to do with his characteristically excellent work and everything to do with a screenplay that’s too clever for its own good but also not clever enough.
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