Review: The Homesman

Life in the American West was a study in extremes as embodied by the women that front the unusual Western The Homesman.

Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank, superb in her best role since Million Dollar Baby) is uncommon for her time: a woman of independent means taking care of her homestead. She is, at 31, fast becoming a spinster though not for lack of trying: she proposes marriage to a suitor at the film's outset, only to be rejected for being plain and bossy. Despite her single status, she has clearly adapted to the hardships of frontier life as opposed to the trio of married women we encounter next: Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto), Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer), and Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter).

Theoline and her husband Vester (William Fichtner) are first seen surveying their dead livestock. The next time we see Theoline, she is clad in a nightgown, newborn suckling at her breast, walking out in the cold to the outhouse. She opens the door and throws her baby down the hole. Arabella, having lost three children to diptheria, has been reduced to a doll-clutching mute. Gro, whose husband has no compunction fulfilling his sexual desires even when his mother-in-law is in the bed with them, becomes a shrieking virago when her dead mother is dragged out into the snow by her husband.

All of the husbands agree they can no longer care for their wives and the reverend (John Lithgow) decides that the women must be transported to Iowa where a minister's wife (Meryl Streep, mother of Gummer) has agreed to take them in. When no one volunteers for the journey, Mary Bee sets out to do it and enlists the help of George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), an army deserter whose life she saves after he's left astride on a horse with a noose around his neck for jumping a claim. The journey proper commences: five weeks across an unforgiving land that find this motley crew exposed to all manner of danger.

Adapted from Glendon Swarthout's novel, The Homesman contains a potpourri of tonal shifts - one minute it's a deadpan comedy, the next veering into Japanese horror territory, then odd couple road movie. The transitions can often be blunt but they somehow work. With its episodic nature and poetic visuals, the film calls to mind Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Missouri Breaks, films that buck and recalibrate the conventions of the Western genre.

While it makes sense for those films to influence Tommy Lee Jones's unsentimental sophomore directorial outing, The Homesman most closely resembles Victor Sjöström silent masterpiece The Wind (interestingly, another female-driven work with screenwriter Francis Marion adapting Dorothy Scarborough's novel). In it, Lillian Gish is slowly undone by her isolation, the inhospitability of the people and the land, and the unrelenting winds. Like Gish's character, the "cuckoo clocks" of The Homesman have buckled under the intrinsic rigours of life in the West. As in The Wind, The Homesman is replete with indelible and often haunting imagery: Otto's walk to the outhouse, Gummer's billowing skirts, Jones causing a conflagration, Swank bathing the three women by the river, and a woman hanging from a tree. The latter image is particularly devastating as it results from a symbolic emasculation.

The Homesman

Directed by: Tommy Lee Jones

Written by: Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, Wesley A. Oliver; adapted from Glendon Swarthout's novel

Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer, Sonja Richter, John Lithgow, William Fichtner, Jesse Plemons, Tim Blake Nelson, Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld, James Spader