Tommy Lee Jones used to be a hot commodity. The Fugitive and Men In Black rank highly among my favorite films. As time goes on, Jones has become extremely old fashioned, looking into playing historical figures from bygone eras. The Homesman reflects Jones’s desire to live in the past, as he is the creative force behind the film. This western brings to mind better films while masquerading as a profound piece on life in the West. Multiple times during this film, I kept asking myself, who will want to watch this? Why should I care?
Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is a single woman about 31 years old living in the Nebraska wild territories. Desperate to find a man, she reaches out to all the single men in the territory only to be rejected for being plain and bossy. When 3 women (Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer, and Sonja Richter) go crazy living in the middle of nowhere, Cuddy agrees to be the girls’ homesman: the caretaker responsible to return them to their families in Iowa. Along the way, Cuddy finds George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) hung from a tree for living in a place that wasn’t his. Briggs agrees to accompany Cuddy and the women on the journey.
The problems I have with this film start with little inconsistencies. The journey from Nebraska to Iowa is supposed to take 5 weeks or so, starting in early May (stated in the movie), and snow and cold is repeatedly encountered as an obstacle. Okay fine. The women go in and out of coherence depending on what the plot asks? I guess alright. But those things start making you rethink what else you see. Each little vignette in the West starts and ends abruptly, (only one involving a freighter is well executed). The point I guess is to show the West was a place of kill or be killed, and in its own way forces a person into survival mode. Instead, these vignettes give the Homesman a disjointed feel that doesn’t really build suspense as it is intended to.
And then the third act rears its ugly head. This movie has about 3 different endings, making less and less sense as the story goes on. Character setups get betrayed to keep the story moving, and rely upon cameos to keep the crowd interested. The already dragging film drags on for an extra 30 minutes to “resolve” in a very unsatisfying way. The biggest issue with the Homesman’s finale is that is will alienate what little audience it had left. Like the sprawling plains? We’re in Iowa. Like the story? It resolves 30 minutes before the end. What becomes of Cuddy and Briggs? Resolved well before the end of the film.
Tommy Lee Jones is the bright spot in the acting department. His character is somewhat of a blank slate, letting actions reveal who he is more than words, and what words he uses are amusing among the desolation. Jones can still act. Hilary Swank has played tomboys before, but here she is forced to play a western version of that. She does the best she can with the material, which is pretty crappy. The three crazy women are requisitely crazy: lots of the movie’s shocks result from their actions; however, they are mostly interchangeable. Familiar faces will pop up for a scene or two and are most welcome, especially Tim Blake Nelson and James Spader.
The Homesman desperately wants to be Dances With Wolves or True Grit, or any of the other great westerns. It falls woefully short, in part because of Tommy Lee Jones’s passion for the project. Perhaps I’m being too hard on the man, but in general, westerns are a façade of an older movie era, as Jones is slowly becoming. Maybe Jones should just go way back: do a biblical epic or something to keep from resurrecting westerns that younger people have no intention of seeing.