As the star and director of The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones seems to be fashioning himself as
another actor-turned-director in the vein of Clint Eastwood. Both share a fascination with the cowboy
archetype and tell stories in grim, matter-of-fact ways, encouraging
understated performances and thematically punishing any characters that dare to
rise above the grimly punishing landscape of the frontier. And for as much as Jones’s film seems to want
to emulate Eastwood’s trademark style, he can’t quite manage to make his film
much more than a nihilistic interpretation of the tragedies that marred
frontier life. That works just fine for
the film’s purposes, but it certainly doesn’t place in on the same tier as his
obvious chief inspiration.
The film opens with spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank),
who eventually agrees to take three disturbed women on a five week journey to
Iowa so that they may be institutionalized.
These three women have all lost their sanity due to the hardships they
have faced on the frontier, whether it be losing one’s children to disease,
killing one’s own child, or rape. As
Cuddy prepares for her journey, she meets a man about to be hanged, who calls
himself George Briggs even though he admits that is not his real name (Tommy
Lee Jones). She enlists his help in
exchange for cutting down his noose and a payment upon delivery of the women,
and the two set out with their charges across the lonely wasteland of the
American West.
The primary conflict revolves around Cuddy’s difficulty in
coping with the madness of her charges, and ultimately seeing how her own
isolation has brought about a similar madness in her. It’s powerful and engaging material, and
Swank pulls it off with gusto, using the gruff yet goofy foil of Jones’s Briggs
to make her plight seem all the more tragic.
Granted, there are certainly undertones that Cuddy and her charges are
in need of a strong masculine presence to stabilize them, but then again, many
of their hardships are brought about by the common, less-than-noble men who
dominated their lives in the first place, so the thematic feminism of the film
comes out as a bit of a wash.
But then, about halfway through the film, the narrative
focus shifts to Briggs, leaving Cuddy’s storyline anticlimactically
resolved. And then, as the film reaches
its final moments, you realize that the finale is going to place Briggs in a
similarly anticlimactic position. The
film is rich with themes and motifs, the latter half consumed with Briggs’s
realization of his own more compassionate nature, but whenever the film comes
close to completing a character arc or providing a bit of closure, the rug is
pulled out from under us and we’re left with a nihilistic notion that life on
the frontier just sucked. This isn’t
necessarily a bad thing, but it makes the film feel a bit pretentious in its
motives, as if to say that noticing the thematic depth of the picture is
worthless because real life carries no thematic weight.
All in all, though, The
Homesman is a pretty decent movie. The
lead performances from Swank and Jones really make their characters enjoyable
to watch, particularly considering that Jones steps out of his usual father
figure persona and makes Briggs equal parts loveable and selfish. However, for a film that is so convicted to be
about nothing, it populates its runtime with enough pointless symbolism to make
a freshman film student weep. Watch it
for the story and the performances, but don’t expect it to amount to more than
the sum of its parts.
Does Tommy Lee Jones have what it takes to follow in Clint
Eastwood’s footstep as a director? Leave
your thoughts in the comments below.
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