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.
