As journeys into the bottomless pit of despair that was frontier life go, The Homesman is a very pretty one.
Directed, co-starring and co-written by Tommy lee Jones and based on a novel by the perfectly named Glendon Swarthout, The Homesman is a variation on that most underrepresented of genres, the western.
Westerns these days are a rare bird, of course. And the reasons for that are fairly obvious: it’s no longer fashionable (some might go so far as to say morally objectionable) to sugarcoat the injustices that our country was built on. A cursory glance at a high school textbook immediately disabuses you of the notion it was all Roy Rogers ballads and elaborate rope tricks.
Thusly deprived of the comforts of fantasy, most westerns these days are forced to swear by a certain level of “realism”, a mandatory grit that traffics in pleasureless violence, aggressive amorality, and a general sense of futility.
And in a nation that is allergic to its own shameful past, that kind of stuff closes out of town.
The Homesman, then, is another in a long line of “modern” westerns, the nature of which can be easily identified by how deeply I had sunk into the couch by the time the end credits rolled.
No question: this is a bleak, bleak slice of American pie.
Which is not to say that it lacks entertainment value.
The story, in short, is that Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), an unmarried woman of a certain age, volunteers to deliver three women in her town who have succumbed to mental illness across the river to Iowa. It’s a dangerous winter journey and she can’t do it alone. Luckily, in her travels, she saves one George Briggs (Jones) from a hanging, and enlists him as her assistant. Though in the end, this might not be the spot of luck it appears to be.
Those looking for gunplay and violence will, for the most part, probably be disappointed. But those looking for top shelf performances and some deeply beautiful imagery will get exactly that, as well as a jaundiced and trenchant look at where we used to be as a society.
To wit: If you think we’re shitty now, you should have seen us back in the day…
Mary Bee Cuddy is a fantastic performance of a tragic character. Dismissed by the men in town as plain and bossy, Cuddy has a reserve of steeliness that only barely covers her loneliness. And when you need a character that operates at the twin poles of strength and quiet desperation, you basically can’t do much better than terminally underutilized Oscar winner Hilary Swank, who has pretty much cornered the market on that sort of thing.
Possibly due to his most famous role as K in the Men In Black series, Jones has a reputation as a minimalist, relentlessly deadpan performer. But for those who recall his gloriously over-the-top turns in Natural Born Killers or Blown Away (or can un-repress the memory of his Two-Face from Batman Forever) know that he can eat scenes as well as any Mega-Actor out there.
George Briggs is one of his goofier characters, introduced in a scene that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and continues on in that vein, alternating moments of outlaw savvy with moments of sheer buffoonery. And then, late in his journey, letting the sadness and sense of displacement seep in, plainly visible but ignored by everyone, all of whom have troubles of their own.
It could be argued that the moments of near-slapstick clash with some of the darker elements of the story, of which there are many. But Jones juggles tones with a minimum of dissonance.
His direction deserves raves all around, in fact: this is nothing if not a beautiful looking movie. Jones shows a real knack for composition, isolating the characters in the frame and showing just how vast and empty the desert around them is. Jones visually conveys the sheer enormity and struggle of their task with grace and style.
The cinematography by Rodrigo Pietro seems to take its influence from the painting of the Hudson River school. While it’s themes may be grim, it certainly doesn’t wallow in the dirt and grime like a lot of modern day westerns: every frame of this movie could be hung in a museum.
Perhaps the most interesting and valuable thing about the film is that it’s actually an exploration of the role of women in the old west. The very premise of the movie pivots on the fact that the simple act of living in this time has led these women to madness.
Arabella (Grace Gummer) has suffered multiple miscarriages, rendering her utterly catatonic. Theoline (Miranda Otto) tosses her newborn baby into an outhouse toilet (a nightmarish sequence we actually see play out onscreen; don’t say I didn’t warn you); and Gro (Sonja Richter) snaps after years of being sexually assaulted by her husband, obsessed with fathering a son.
Their lives have hollowed them out and damaged them beyond repair. But even worse than that, they’ve become a problem for their husbands, which cannot be tolerated.
Mary Bee isn’t insane, but as a woman of a certain age with opinions of her own and a tendency towards self sufficiency, she is an outcast. The lay of the land is set in her opening scene, where she makes dinner for a potential suitor (Evan Jones), and practically begs him to marry her, laying it out as more of a business transaction than anything even remotely to do with romance. When she is rejected for her plainness and her bossiness (by Cheddar Bob of all people, an even deeper indignity), it’s heartbreaking because we can tell just from the look on Hilary Swank’s face that this isn’t just a matter of the heart; it’s a matter of basic survival.
Swank and Jones are most of the show here. Gummer, Richter and Otto are along for the ride, but due to the nature of their madness, don’t get to contribute much. Which, as it turns out, is a statement that can apply to most of the ridiculous top-loaded cast. William Fichtner, John Lithgow, Jesse Plemmons, Meryl Streep, and Hailee Steinfeld all pass through the movie, and perform adequately in very small roles. The only two who make anything other than a standard impression are Tim Blake Nelson as a dumb-assed hick who runs off with one of the girls; and especially James Spader, who is hilarious in his brief cameo as a supercilious Irish hotel owner. He provides laughs at a point in the movie where they are desperately needed.
Because when all is said and done, this is a dark, dark story that exists within the constraints of historical realism, which means that a happy ending just isn’t in the cards. The crazy aren’t cured. Justice isn’t served. And love steadfastly refuses to conquer all, if it even exists in the first place.
It might as well be a documentary…
SPECIAL FEATURES: Several behind the scenes featurettes, where almost everybody interviewed talk so slowly and take so many pauses that it’s actively aggravating to watch.
