The Homesman

Tommy Lee Jones’ third film as a director, The Homesman, is a beautiful looking, wonderfully acted, but oddly constructed western. Hillary Swank plays a hardy, pious, plain looking frontier woman named Mary Bee Cuddy. Just as tough as, and far more compassionate than, most menfolk, Cuddy volunteers to escort three less resilient women—wives driven mad by the harsh pioneer life—back to the civilized East.  Jones plays George Briggs, a cantankerous old drifter whom Cuddy convinces to join her on the long, difficult journey though hostile country. 

Swank delivers a nuanced and deeply sympathetic performance as the soulful Cuddy. The early scenes lead you to think Jones will spin a rare non-exploitive, feminist western along the lines of Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Joe (1993). But as soon as Jones’ Homesman character shows up the film switches gears into a more traditional cross-country western, like Don Siegel’s Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) or the Coen Brothers’ True Grit (2010).  At the turn into the final act, we get an even more unexpected shift in form and tone, and the picture becomes a kind of psychological meditation on the western, reminiscent of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek's Cutoff (2010). 

The Homesman isn’t as effective as any of these other films because of its peculiar structure. Jones and his co-screenwriters don’t attempt anything especially fancy in adapting Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel, yet the film comes off as intentionally confounding. It’s an episodic picture with erratic chapters—some unexpected and original, some utterly conventional.  For example, the pioneer wives’ madness, which ostensibly initiates the story, is buried in confusing flashback scenes. Jones mastered the flashback structure with his exquisite directorial début, the contemporary western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005). But the period western is perhaps the genre that benefits least from a non-linear approach to storytelling. Poetry and sub-textual commentary can be astoundingly rich when allowed to unfold via the simple, straightforward conventions of this timeworn cinematic style.

The movie does, however, deftly illustrate the hardships and heartbreak of frontier life, with striking but unromanticized cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto (Frida, Brokeback Mountain, Argo).  In Mary Bee Cuddy, Swank creates a unique, compelling, fully realized individual—the kind we don’t usually get in a western picture. Jones’s role, on the other hand, is similar to the crotchety old men he and many others have played in countless films. But while it’s clear that Jones the director wants to turn the focus away from his character and give the movie over to the poetic visuals, somber tone, and to his gifted lead actress, The Homesman is ultimately about George Briggs. And Briggs is an ornery cuss who doesn’t cotton to changing his ways—a difficult customer around which to build a picture.