The Homesman—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell                

The Homesman. Released in U.S.: Nov. 21, 2014. Running time: 122 mins. Rated: R for violence, sexual content, some disturbing behavior and nudity.

Life was rough on the Nebraska frontier in pioneer times. It may have been especially rough on the pioneer women. After all, they had to deal not only with isolation, hard work, wild weather and other difficulties and dangers out there on the prairie, but also with the difficult and dangerous pioneer men. Some went crazy as a result. It is the situation of these women—and one who sought to save them—that is the subject of The Homesman, directed by, co-written by and co-starring Tommy Lee Jones.

The three women in the film who break under the pressures of frontier life include: one who is repeatedly raped by her husband in his attempt to have children—she becomes extremely violent; one who loses all her children to illness and becomes extremely melancholic; and one who throws her own child down the “hole” of a privy and becomes virtually catatonic.

The woman who decides to rescue these three and take them on a long journey in a mule-drawn kind of paddy wagon to a church in Iowa that will care for them is Mary Bell Cuddy, a spinster and former teacher described by one man as “too bossy and too damn plain.” Cuddy is played by Hilary Swank, whose career in film has often featured strong women characters. Swank also, although far from being a plain woman, has the ability, to paraphrase the old TV ad, to “play one” in the movies. To assist her, Cuddy hires George Briggs, a grizzled ne'er-do-well, who does, however, have considerable practical abilities. Briggs is the character played by Tommy Lee Jones, with his typical gruff skill.

Adventures and vicissitudes ensue as the wagon makes its way eastward across the trackless wastes of the Wild West. The hardships involved eventually start to make both Cuddy and Briggs, as it were, crazy like the three women. In shocking scenes, Cuddy does harm to herself, and Briggs does harm, putting it mildly, to others. At the end of the movie, Briggs has some brief but interesting encounters with characters played by Meryl Streep and Hailee Steinfield.

Some “footnotes” for the film: Tommy Lee Jones has appeared in both classic Westerns (such as the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove) and contemporary ones (such as No Country for Old Men and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, which he also directed). The Homesman, with its classic “dangerous journey of diverse characters with a 'civilizing' mission” and its contemporary feminist themes, is a kind of combination of these two kinds of Westerns. The considerable number of stars (Streep, Steinfield, John Lithgow, James Spader) and noted character actors (such as Barry Corbin, William Fichtner, Tim Blake Nelson) in brief roles in the film suggests that Tommy Lee Jones may have called on his many friends in the Hollywood community to help with his project. And Jones also boosts his own family's careers by casting his son and daughter in the picture. (Streep's daughter is also in the film.) Those familiar with the roles played by Jones and Streep as a married couple in 2012's Hope Springs may be amused by the tone of the scenes between the two in The Homesman. Also, those who recall Hailee Steinfield's role in the recent remake of True Grit will appreciate her interaction here with a character as grizzled as Rooster Cogburn in that film. And, finally, it's interesting to note that a journey across Nebraska by a grizzled character formed the plot of the acclaimed 2013 film Nebraska.