Jones both directs and acts in this film that he co-scripted with Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver based on a novel titled The Shootist by Glendon Swarthout.
Mary Bee Cuddy played by Hilary Swank is a 31 year old spinster in a small mid-Western pioneer town. She is a Nebraska farmer who ploughs fields and works alongside the men in the community and she is relatively successful despite not having a husband at the advanced age of 31.
When three women of the pioneer community who have lost their minds need to be transported to a refuge in Iowa Mary is the only person capable of doing the job and she is designated by her church to transport the three women in a wagon back East.
Mary gets some much needed but unexpected help in her task when she rescues claim-jumper and outlaw George Briggs played by Tommy Lee Jones. Jones is about to be hung when Mary saves his life and extracts a promise from him to help her transport the three women East.
This could turn into a semi-comic odd couple movie at this point but it doesn’t. Jones has a more serious agenda in mind. This is really an all female Western except for Jones and the action revolves around Mary and the three women as well as the flat, bleak and mono-chromatic landscape of the Great Western Plains.
Mary’s three charges are three young wives who did not make it through the rigors of the great pioneer experience. We meet Arabella Sours played by Grace Gummer whose three children have died of diphtheria, Theoline Belknap played by Miranda Otto who threw her baby down into an outhouse and Gro Svendsen played by Sonja Richter who is possessed by what seem to be evil spirits.
As a director Jones keeps a tight rein on his actors who turn in understated performances in keeping with the controlled and unemotional fortitude that a character like Mary must have had to be to survive in the harsh pioneer environment.
As Mary and George progress across the Great Plains the encounter snowstorms and are attacked by Indians. DoP Rodrigo Pieto captures the significance of the landscape and its unwelcoming aspect. There is a great expanse of emptiness that the characters have to be big enough to fill as the landscape is also a character in the film.
The story is one of the pioneers crossing America only in the wrong direction. While normally we are accustomed to seeing the pioneers with the courage to head West to conquer the wild prairie these are the women who are heading East because they could not find the courage to live this hard and desolate pioneer life. These were those who were pitted against the endurance test and failed.
Jones manages to direct himself with restraint as the rascal George never letting himself play the same stock Western characters he has played in the past but keeping his interpretations fresh. Swank gets what is her best role since Million Dollar Baby and turns in an excellent performance.
The Homesman is a far cry from John Ford and while following a rather traditional type of story Jones manages to bring something quite different to the screen than Westerns we have seen before.
Credits: The Homesman (USA)
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, David Dencik, William Fichtner, Grace Gummer, John Lithgow, Tim Blake Nelson, Miranda Otto, Jesse Plemons, Sonja Richter, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Meryl Streep.
