Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank excel in a near-feminist western
By N.B.
TOMMY LEE JONES'S tremendous new film, “The Homesman”, is a boldly unusual western, in that the villain cannot be defeated in a gunfight at high noon. The villain, if there is one, is the land itself: the flat, dry, dusty terrain of Nebraska in the mid-1800s, where the winds are biting, disease is rife, and only a few farmers are stubborn enough to carve out an existence. This focus on the harsh landscape is one of the two aspects that make Mr Jones’s film so distinctive. The other is its focus on the women in that landscape. While it might be going too far to call “The Homesman” a feminist western, it comes as close as this historically macho genre ever has.
Despite the film’s ironic title, the lead character is in fact female. Running a farm singlehandedly, the industrious Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is brimming with optimism, but even she is battered by the loneliness of frontier life. It’s hardly credible that Cuddy—who has the straight teeth, clear skin and glossy hair of a 21st-century movie star—would be deemed as “plain as an old tin pail”, or that she wouldn’t be able to persuade anyone to marry her. On the other hand, her choice of potential partners is severely limited, given that the nearest town comprises half a dozen houses. Her desire for a husband is matched only by her desire for a musical instrument: touchingly, she makes do with a cloth with a piano keyboard embroidered on it.
Still, Cuddy isn’t the most unfortunate woman in the area. Three of the local housewives have been driven mad by the inhospitable environment (and, in at least one case, by her own husband): jarring flashbacks keep reminding us how torturous their lives have been. The vicar (John Lithgow) arranges for the women to be cared for in Iowa, but it’s left to Cuddy to transport them across the country in a horse-drawn wagon. She is prepared to make the trip on her own, but when she saves a thieving drifter (Mr Jones) from a hanging by vigilantes, he repays her, grudgingly, by accompanying her on the long trek.
They make a delightfully odd couple. The drifter, who calls himself George Briggs, is a dissolute, selfish, but redoubtable old gunfighter, whereas Cuddy is scrupulously neat and pious, with an undercurrent of yearning vulnerability. Sixty years ago, they might have been played by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn—but it’s unlikely that anyone could have played them with more conviction than Mr Jones and Ms Swank.
Once their journey gets underway, “The Homesman” becomes a road movie with no road. In place of a plot, it has a series of discrete setbacks and encounters, including ripe comic cameos from Tim Blake Nelson and James Spader. But what links these vignettes is the strange, forbidding atmosphere of the lawless land, and the sense that it could easily wear away its inhabitants’ sanity. Days and weeks pass as Cuddy and Briggs push on through the otherwordly plains, but the only people they meet are bandits, and the only town they see is an arrangement of stakes in the ground where a speculator is planning to build houses. The Wild West has never seemed wilder.
Mr Jones, who also directs and co-writes, has made a quiet, intimate drama with a small cast and very little story, but it’s also a fully fledged epic, complete with elemental themes and bleakly beautiful vistas. It’s sometimes shocking, sometimes funny and sometimes nightmarish, but it’s always sympathetic towards its characters. For the three women in the wagon, weeks spent bumping through the desert are a holiday compared with what they endured in Nebraska.
