"The Homesman": Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts

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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.

"St. Vincent": Bill Murray Almost Saves It

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St. Vincent really straddles the line between being genuinely fun and being too hokey for its own good.  It’s okay for a film to be formulaic, so long as the dialogue and performances pick up the slack that the plotting leaves, and this film seems to only truly deliver through the vessel of one actor: the ineffable Bill Murray.  As per always, Murray is a joy to see on screen, his trademark irreverence toward the world making his humor distinctive and instantly recognizable.  Equally impressive is the way that he tinges his cynicism with melancholy, giving depth to a character that would otherwise be just another grumpy old man cliché.  And yet, Murray is perhaps the only thing about this film that rises above mediocrity, and that can make a slog of the scenes where he isn’t present.

The plot formula is one we’ve all seen before, with a grumpy older man, the titular Vincent (Murray), finding himself babysitting his new neighbor’s wimpy, nerdy kid.  The unlikely pair start to get close, with Vincent teaching the kid to stand up for himself while instilling the vices of gambling and barhopping into his young, yet somehow unshakably pure mind.  Meanwhile, the kid’s virtues start to soften Vincent’s heart and demonstrate that he’s not such a bad guy after all, and yeah, you can see the other trite plot details coming from a mile away.

Now, this wouldn’t be so bad if the writing were solid, but it mostly isn’t.  Vincent as a written character seems to be closer to Dennis the Menace’s Mr. Wilson than the persona we normally see Murray adopt, and the only reason Vincent is made even remotely funny is through the sheer force of Murray’s expert delivery.  Every other character feels fresh from the factory, from the saccharinely sweet child character, to the overworked, barely-making-ends-meet divorced mom, to Vincent’s pregnant prostitute girlfriend, who may sound like an original character, but mostly serves the role of being Vincent’s non-child confidant.  It all feels so formulaic that there doesn’t really seem to be a point to the film other than seeing Murray make what should have been a forgettable role into the only standout performance in the whole production.

And, unfortunately, that’s ultimately what makes this one a loser as far as I’m concerned, because by the film’s latter half, Murray’s wise-cracking amoralisms take a backseat to the aggrandizement of Vincent’s better qualities, which ultimately makes him a more boring character than he was before.  The film’s climax is literally the kid character giving a speech about all of Vincent’s great qualities and why, even though he is a jerk, deep down Vincent is still a great man.  All the build-up for that scene is so devoid of comedy, including a forced stroke-and-recovery mini-arc for Murray to suffer through, that it sucks the life out of what had until then been a passable exercise in traditionalism.

I’d really only recommend this for the die-hard Bill Murray fans, for you are the people most likely to at least glean some worthy enjoyment from his persona.  However, the film’s plot is so full of cliché and overused tropes that there really doesn’t seem to be much of a point to it beyond its star’s performance, and even that is given the short shrift by the end.

Have a favorite Bill Murray film?  Tell us in the comments below.

"Rosewater": Jon Stewart's Disappointing Debut

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I like The Daily Show.  I like Jon Stewart.  I like political commentary and political satire.  So why is it that I don’t really like Rosewater, the political film directed by Jon Stewart of Daily Show fame.  Well, and I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it’s because the film reminds me of American Sniper.  Yep.  I’m comparing a film beloved by conservative masses to a film made by one of the most optimistically liberal voices in media today.  And while Stewart’s directorial debut isn’t quite as lifeless and drab as Clint Eastwood’s latest, it suffers from many of the same issues, most notably a lack of narrative drive or a compelling protagonist.

To those unfamiliar with the story of Maziar Bahari, he was a journalist for Newsweek magazine who covered the Iranian elections in 2009.  After filming riots in the streets following the election, Bahari was imprisoned by the Iranian government and accused of being an American spy seeking to discredit the Iranian government.  He was then psychologically tortured for four months, until a social media campaign forced the Iranian government to release him or risk losing face.

To the film’s credit, Bahari’s story has a bit more of a through line than Chris Kyle’s, as Bahari has a definitive antagonist in the form of his warden and torturer, and his journey to find strength is at least salvageable from the emotional nullity the film has to offer.  However, the film allocates its time and resources much too heavily toward Bahari’s time spent in his cell, oddly hallucinating family members who tell him to keep to his convictions.  The torture scenes lack any sort of passion to make them engaging, and Bahari’s true savior, the media campaign for his release, feels like a deus ex machina footnote at the end of a barely existent character arc.

Jon Stewart’s personal politics are no big secret, and yet he seems to have so visibly restrained himself in the course of making Rosewater that the film has no political drive until the film’s final shots, and that is too little too late.  The final shots tell us that there are still people working within Iran to expose the injustices of their government, but that revolution is unseen and forgotten after the first act, making that ending seem tacked on and out of place in light of the survivor story we just witnessed.  And the beginning of the film shows a lot of promise in that respect, demonstrating how the Iranian government represses free speech and the underground forces who seek to spread the word about the country’s internal injustices.  However, almost all of this is eliminated once Bahari is imprisoned, paradoxically making Bahari a stronger character for finally having an arc, yet robbing the film of its sense of purpose.

Rosewater feels like a film I should like, but I simply can’t get behind the notion that simply recounting true events makes for good filmmaking.  Jon Stewart is an intelligent man who likely has a bright career ahead of him, hopefully making more films, because the potential for greatness is definitely here.  However, in removing a political voice for the majority of the film’s runtime, from events that are inherently political, the film ends up feeling pointless as a work of fiction.  Much like American Sniper, Rosewater feels like it would have been better presented as a documentary, because without a stronger character focus and a more emotionally driven narrative, the whole production feels more than a little stale and lifeless.

Sad to see Jon Stewart leaving The Daily Show?  Leave your bemoaning in the comments below.