There’s No Place Like Home, Man!
The Homesman / directed by Tommy Lee Jones
The Homesman feels like a significant milepost on whatever forlorn and tumbleweed-strewn existential tableau the clash of traditional and more revisionist westerns takes place. In fact, although there’s not really any tumbleweed to be seen, set as it is in the antebellum Nebraska Territory, the flat semi-arid landscapes that form the backdrop of nearly all the action in the film form a stage on which the most fundamental human emotions and desires starkly play out; this film’s a fresh and cynical take on settlement of the West, but also an even wider canvas on which play questions of human nature, civilization, and faith.
I use the phrase a lot more often than I should, but for once I think “shit show” is the appropriate term for what transpired last winter in The Homesman’s Loup City. Three women have gone mad, each in their own way, but all from the piteously harsh circumstances of their lives: the loss of children, crop failure, rape. I’m sure there’s some sort of clinical diagnosis that would fit, but you could say heartbreak and hopelessness are at the root of it. Settlement of the west as a machine for the creation of broken souls: can we get much bleaker than that?
A little bit yes, but mostly no, as things play out across The Homesman. The women need to be returned east to their families for caregiving, and the task ends up falling to Mary Bee Cuddy (Hillary Swank), a resourceful single woman who’s put together a solid farmstead as well as any of the men around. Mary Bee ends up recruiting a ne’er do well named George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) to assist her; strung up and left to die by vigilante miners, she makes him swear to follow her orders in exchange for saving his life (before she finds him, we witness Jones rousted from his claimjumped cabin by a stick of dynamite dropped down the chimney, like a karmically-challenged Road Runner finally done in by Wile E. Coyote). This will not be the first time that the movie contemplates the exchange of one life for another and what the fuller implications of this might be. Grubby, uncouth and ethically challenged, Briggs is hardly a promising companion, not to mention Mary Bee’s antithesis, and their unlikely partnership is the film’s heart - not just in the complexities of their relationship, but at a primal energetic level. Briggs is the drunken life of the party to Mary Bee’s stoic, heroic plodder. Among director Jones’ goals for this movie, surely one of them must to have been to establish his own character as a benchmark for orneriness against which future Western characters must be judged.
As their ramshackle wagon transits empty plain after empty plain, a rhythm of trial and compassion is established, as the two gaolers care for their charges and move through a land that leaves perhaps too much time for contemplation. It’s also a progression punctuated by sudden and extreme dangers (pillaging travelers, marauding Native Americans, snowstorms). Between the spells of peace and outbreaks of violence, the journey proves a harrowing, a test of faith and whether life has any greater purpose and the relative salvageability of the human race. Beyond the reach of the law, the possibility of murder and rape are constant concerns; and in this land without rules, it shouldn’t be surprising that our protagonists aren’t always necessarily the victims of these threats. Mary Bee seems both made to shine and be worn down by the journey: compassionate in her care for the women, tough in the face of adversity, we see her nonetheless paying an unspoken price for her experience; it may be that as they approach civilization, she’s increasingly reminded of all the softer things in life that she’s left behind and perhaps will never have. The film’s finale is a tour de force of heartbreak, Old-Testament revenge, and prosaic redemption, Iowa-style, with Meryl Streep swooping in as a flustered angel of mercy.
Swank’s portrayal of Mary Bee is solid; she conveys a character of quiet strength and even quieter despair, a woman who’s more of a man than most of the males around her, but who’s acutely aware of her own limitations. And the three broken women are played with great perspicacity by Grace Gummer, Mirando Otto, and Sonja Richter; both singly and as a sort of tragic Greek chorus, they convey sorrow, dissolution, and despair, never letting us lose sight of their basic humanity and the fact that, though they may seem cut off from the world, their real conundrum is that they’ve come too close to its harsher possibilities - performances all the more remarkable in that they’re more or less entirely non-speaking roles.
Jones’ Briggs, though, is the centerpiece of the film’s performances. With his immensely craggy visage and aforementioned ornery ‘tude, one feels, to use a cliche, that Jones was born to play this role. Briggs captivates by his selfishness, by the signs of change that we glimpse now and again for a better man, and by his whole-hearted embrace of the occasionally lawless world he lives in. He’s playful and profound, embodying the film’s combination of prosaic and transcendent in his quirks, evasions, cruelties, and acts of kindness.