With its bleak, unsparing depiction of life on the frontier
in the 1850’s, “The Homesman” stands in stark
contrast to what we tend to think of as a traditional Western. Far from the
romantic odes to the heroic figures of the Old West we’re used to seeing, the
film instead delivers a mournful tale of unimaginable adversity while also
acting as a sort of feminist critique of the genre. That this story is directed
and co-written by Tommy Lee Jones (with Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver,
adapting from the novel by GlendonSwarthout) is just one of the many surprising aspects of
this unconventional and ultimately rather subversive film.
Westerns have never been known for particularly strong or
multifaceted depictions of women, but “The Homesman”
gives us a great one in the form of Mary Bee Cuddy
(Hilary Swank) a no-nonsense, 31-year-old pioneer woman living on her own in
the Nebraska Territory. Despite capably running a farm well enough to live
comfortably, Mary finds her proposals of marriage dismissed (on two separate
occasions) on account of her intended finding her too plain and too bossy to be
of any appeal. No matter how intelligent and skilled she may be, her looks and
willingness to play the submissive wife are the attributes she’s judged by in
the community and by the men that surround her.
Following a particularly harsh winter, three women in the
village appear to have lost their minds, driven mad by unrelenting hardship,
death, and disease. Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) has seen all three of her
children die of diphtheria in the same week, and Theoline
Belknap (Miranda Otto) drowned her infant child in an outhouse, while GroSvendsen (Sonja Richter) has
turned deranged as the result of the loss of her mother and a marriage to a
brute of a husband. With each of their husbands unable or unwilling to take
care of them, it’s decided that the women should be taken to a sanitorium run by a Methodist minister in Iowa, where they
can be looked after. When none of the men in the village will volunteer for the
task, Mary agrees to take the women on the five-week-long trek across the
Missouri River and back toward civilization. Knowing the difficulty that
awaits, she enlists the aid of a cantankerous claim jumper who calls himself George
Briggs (Jones) after saving him from hanging and promising him $300 in bank
notes for his trouble. With the three near-catatonic women tied up and chained
inside a wooden box of a wagon, the group head off East, and the majority of
the film’s running time is devoted to their journey: the obstacles they face
and the sundry individuals they come across.
At the heart of the film is the relationship between Cuddy and Briggs, and the continual shifts in how they view
and relate to one another. Throughout the journey, they show themselves to be
more complicated than they first appear, revealing both more strength and more
vulnerability than either one expects. Swank and Jones both give spectacular
performances, adding impressive layers to their archetypal roles.
In his second feature (after 2005’s “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada”), Tommy Lee Jones adamantly refuses to
offer a neat, tidy tale for his audience to easily digest, and “The Homesman” frequently makes for a singularly unusual viewing
experience. Its hopelessly bleak depiction of the Old West is shot through with
moments of almost pitch black humor and jarring tonal shifts. Even with the odd
bit of levity, its world is one of hardship and loneliness that makes damaged,
pitiful creatures of those lucky (or unlucky) enough to live through it, and
the script is especially attuned to the many sacrifices women in particular
were frequently called upon to make. “The Homesman”
seems to imply that the women’s madness is an inevitable side effect of life as
an early settler. Its story offers an indelible counter to the idea of the
American frontier as a land of opportunity: for every few who find their
fortune, countless more are left broken in the dust.
George Grella also saw “The Homesman.” For his take on the film, click here.
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2014.
