SECONDSCREEN

The Homesman is a Western chock-full of interesting ideas – about goodness and self-sacrifice and the endless battle between hope and disappointment. But having enjoyed it really quite a lot when I saw it at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, I found myself warming to it a little less the second time around.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still ambitious, well-made and must have an outside chance of grabbing an Oscar nomination or two – Hilary Swank gives a particularly good central performance – but the end result is a real curate’s egg: too much at times, under-developed at others and marred by a huge plot twist that stops the story almost in its tracks.

Swank plays Mary Bee Cuddy, a feisty pioneer in the Nebraska territories of the 1850s. She’s alone but hard-working and, unlike others, is making a real go of her claim. But she’s also quietly religious and inherently good, so when three local women are driven mad by a harsh winter, it is she rather than the feckless men who offers to take the women on the perilous journey back East for treatment.

She stumbles across a possible source of help when she finds an ageing man, George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones, pictured above with Swank), who’s been tied to his horse with a rope around his neck by a lynch mob for using another man’s land as his own.

She cuts him down, making him promise to accompany her on her dangerous journey.

The Homesman has been described as the first feminist Western. But the longer it goes on, the less accurate that seems to be. This is still a man’s world, even if the man in question is the whiskysozzled Briggs. Jones sprinkles a little too much comedy into what is essentially a tragic tale.

Several obstacles stand in the way of a richer enjoyment of