The Homesman

Synopsis: Pioneer life in the West in the 1850s is unforgiving particularly for the women setlers  who struggle with disease, isolation and husbands for whom they are little more than chattels. It’s enough to make you lose your mind. Which is what happens to three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto and Sonja Richter) in the little town of Loup, Nebraska.  Strong-willed, outspoken homesteader Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), thirty-one and unmarried and acknowledged by the town preacher (John Lithgow) to be “as good as any man”, offers to drive the wagon, and enlists the help of a dubious opportunist, George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones).

Tommy Lee Jones’s second outing as a director (his first being The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada in 2005 in which like this film he also starred) is a revisionist Western that looks good, has a fine cast and a mostly engaging story.

Whilst Swank is effective as a tough-minded frontierswoman in what is a solid performance (the fact that she has to beg men to marry her, however, stretches credulity), the film really belongs to Jones (who is also credited as one of the writers) as a cantankerous, unfeeling scallywag who to save his scrawny neck agrees to accompany Mary Bee on her trip by wagon back to Iowa. Jones plays his usual taciturn but prickly persona to a tee and the best part of the film is the burgeoning relationship between the determined spinster and her reluctant helper with Jones the director bringing compassion and humour to the refreshingly stripped back if rather grim story of survival in the Old West

Unfortunately however his characteristic laconicism works against him. I don’t know if it is in the 1988 novel by Glendon Swarthout on which the film is based but presume so but at a certain point with a good deal to the story yet to go Mary Bee is abruptly removed from the narrative, robbing the film of its principal interest and leaving it to flatline through a clutch of incidents (notably an encounter with James Spader in a surreally swanky hotel in the middle of nowhere) that don’t add to our experience. Indeed the story effectively culminates with Briggs delivering his charges to their destination (where Meryl Streep awaits) a chastened man transformed by his association with Mary Bee. It should have ended there but Jones loses his hold over this main idea, one that would have left us with a substantial emotional pay-off, and lets the film ramble to its shaggy conclusion.

The Homesman looks fabulous thanks Rodrigo Prieto’s spare widescreen cinematography whilst Marco Beltrami provides a haunting score and if Jones had tightened the reins it could have been very good. As it is, it is still a film well worth-watching.

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