Hard to love, easy to respect
The Homesman the most unromantic movie you’ll ever watch
The emptiness leaves an ache that settles low in the stomach and stays there, burning a hole in your gut that lingers long after the final frame fades to black. Clearly, Tommy Lee Jones isn’t afraid to give his viewers a cinematic ulcer because The Homesman marks his second turn directing a feature, and it’s just as disturbing and existentially pressing as The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a modern morality tale that was set in West Texas and based on a book by Guillermo Arriaga (Babel), but inspired by Ecclesiastes, and the human search for meaning.
The Homesman is also based on a book, in this case written by Glendon Swarthout. It’s the mid 19th century and the American frontier is a wild, untamed place that attracts ambitious young men hoping to make their fortune by turning dirt into money with their bare hands.
Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is an anomaly in this rustic frame. Plowing the rocks and dirt of the Nebraska territory into a homestead, this middle-aged woman is alone but she is able. Strong, solid and morally upright, she appears to be the model American forging her future the American way. The only problem is she is a woman. She needs to find a mate to ensure a sense of continuity.
But she has relentless faith, as witnessed by the dinner she cooks for her next-door neighbour in the opening scene. It’s only the two of them out there in her little house on the prairie, and for a moment, we worry about her safety. But it’s the guest who delivers the awkward rebuff after dessert, telling Mary she is far “too plain” to partner with.
Undeterred, Mary carries on, confident in God and the divine plan. She wears her faith like armour, and so it’s like a latterday-Joan that Mary is called upon to help three mentally ill women back to civilization. Ravaged by disease, the loss of newborns, constant physical abuse and the perpetual isolation of pioneer life, these three women have entered psychotic, dissociated states.
Mary needs help on her weekslong voyage, and she finds it in the unlikely form of a thieving old fart named Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones). Mary rescues him from a noose on the condition that he join her on the journey.
For the next 90 or so minutes, we’re on a crotchety road trip with two mismatched protagonists.
The Homesman is a story of faith versus the void, civilization versus the frontier, life versus death. It’s dark matter, but Jones and Swank bring some sparkle to the dust with their perfectly balanced performances.
Jones has a knack for putting the hard C in curmudgeon, and he lets himself ride a thin rail of sympathy as the ruffian Briggs. But Swank has a tougher part to pull off. She has to embody all the goodness, optimism and the strength of the American ideal, but in this revisionist picture of America’s past, her faith becomes her biggest liability.
Miraculously, Swank pulls off every frame with such dignity and wholeness, we believe and care about every second of her struggle.
Sharing thematic links to the once-maligned, but now-resurrected Heaven’s Gate, The Homesman makes a few corrections to the accepted manuscript of U.S. history, pointing out the beginnings of government corruption and scraping away at the romance of the frontier.
In fact, this may be the most unromantic movie you will ever watch, which makes it hard to love, but easy to respect.