Hilary Swank stars as Mary Bee Cuddy, a
hardy Nebraska homesteader who manages her own farm, but has been unable
to find anyone willing to marry her. A harsh winter strikes her small
farming community, and three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and
Sonja Richter) lose their minds after various hardships. With no one
else willing, Cuddy agrees to take the women to Iowa, where arrangements
can be made to send them back East. The trip will require several
weeks travel through dangerous country, so Cuddy recruits a questionable
claim jumper, George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), after saving him from
being lynched, to aid her on the journey.
At first
glance this seems to follow the basic template of your modern western:
take the bones of an exciting adventure story from a classic western and
add unconventional heroic figures, an emphasis on the hardship of the
American pioneer experience, and overtones of social progressiveness.
The journey through hard terrain full of dangerous Indians and criminals
goes all the way back to "Stagecoach," but here our heroine is an
oddball, unattractive, unmarried woman trying to wrangle three insane
charges and an untrustworthy hired hand. Modern conventional wisdom
suggests that she win the day through significant personal sacrifice,
and help to redeem her travelling companions along the way. The Coen
brothers' "True Grit," is be a good model. But this is not what happens
in "The Homesman."
I keep coming back to "No
Country For Old Men" as the more appropriate Coens' move to compare "The
Homesman" to, which Tommy Lee Jones also starred in. The most vital
and important part of "Homesman" is actually the long denouement after
the more exciting chapters of the film have concluded, where Jones'
character takes center stage and major themes are recontextualized from
his point of view. I think I can say without giving anything away that
both films are ultimately about failure, displacement, loss, and
grappling with terrible events that may be ultimately meaningless. And
the deliberateness and the candidness of how these ideas are handled
sets the film apart, even if the film itself isn't quite up to snuff.
Now,
there's plenty to like about the filmmaking here. Rodrigo Prieto's
cinematography is always stirring, particularly the night and interior
scenes, and the quiet montages of the three women descending into
madness, one by one. Marco Beltrami's score is a standout. The
performances are excellent, with Hilary Swank at the height of her
powers as the tough but warm-hearted Cuddy. She has excellent chemistry
with Tommy Lee Jones, and their sharp back-and-forth alone is worth the
price of admission. The cast is populated with familiar faces, many of
whom turn in fine smaller performances - James Spader as a pompous
hotel owner, John Lithgow as a sympathetic reverend, and Meryl Streep
and Hailee Steinfeld in roles I think it's better to let the viewer
discover for themselves.
The film falters in its
final third, however, and that all-important denouement. The pacing
slows to an interminable crawl, the narrative becomes oddly episodic
where it hadn't been before, and the direction turns awfully
ham-handed. The scenes with Meryl Streep are just awkward and feel like
they belong in a different movie. Tommy Lee Jones never loses the plot
here, and gets his points across, but there are some serious tonal and
narrative problems that threaten to undermine the whole venture. I
suspect a lot of it comes down to George Briggs not being nearly as
interesting onscreen here than the other major characters, and Jones'
performance being tasked with supporting more than it could handle.
"The
Homesman" is still a very impressive sophomore effort for Jones, and
there's so much in it that I find myself still thinking about in very
positive terms. It's a beautiful character piece, a subversion of a
subversion of a genre, and really makes me wish Hilary Swank would
get more work.
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