Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Where No Man Has Gone Before: Film Review of The Homesman
By Geoff Carter
Compared to the primordial age of films and television during the twentieth century, we live in an embarrassment of riches. Although the groundbreaking miniseries Roots and The Holocaust debuted on network television in 1977, the general entertainment TV fare consisted of silly sitcoms, cop shows, and medical dramas. The occasional flashes of brilliance like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Laugh-In, or All in the Family would somehow mysteriously emerge, but generally, television was not that good—but we watched it anyway.
With the later emergence of cable and then streaming TV, the quality of limited series rose exponentially, and streaming channels now offer hundreds—if not thousands—of movies to watch. The choices seem endless. One could spend hours scrolling through Netflix, Hulu, and Prime trying to choose something to watch. It is an embarrassment of riches. New releases have become hard to keep track of—there’s just too many of them.
I was browsing Facebook the other day when snippets from a Western with Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank popped up. The film is named The Homesman, and it looked intriguing, so I looked it up and sure enough, there it was on Prime Video. It was released in 2014, but somehow, in the torrential downpour of films and limited series available, I’d missed it, which was too bad. It is a disturbing and brilliant movie, a take on frontier living. If it hadn’t been for Facebook (of all places), I would have missed it entirely.
The film, which takes place sometime during the 1850s, begins as Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is tilling the field of her own farm. It seems to be an impressive spread. Mary comes in from plowing, straightens the house, sets the table, and starts dinner. It’s obvious she’s expecting someone. Her neighbor Bob Giffen (Evan Jones) arrives, and she treats him to dinner and after they eat and Mary sings, while accompanying herself on a keyboard embroidered on a rug, she proposes to Bob, who refuses, telling her she is too plain and too bossy and that he will go East to find a wife.
After a rough winter, three of the local women have suffered horribly. Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) has lost three children to diphtheria. After fearing starvation after a poor harvest, Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto) kills one of her children. After losing her mother and suffering an abusive marriage, Gro Svendsen has a complete breakdown. These symptoms were typical of prairie madness, which afflicted settlers new to the painful hardships of frontier living. Reverend Dowd (John Lithgow), the local minister, demands that one of the men escort the women back East to The Ladies’ Aid Methodist Church in Iowa where there is a hospital for the mentally ill.
When the men balk at taking on the dangerous trek, Mary Bee volunteers to take them by herself. Before she leaves, Mary Bee happens upon George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) who happens to be sitting on a horse with a noose around his neck after being apprehended by local vigilantes for claim jumping. Mary Bee cuts him down after making him promise to accompany her on the trip to return the sick women East. After Mary offers him three hundred dollars, Briggs reluctantly agrees.
During the trip, they run into a group of hostile Pawnee. Briggs buys them off by giving them Mary’s horse. When Arabella disappears one morning, Briggs tracks her and finds she has been kidnapped by a trader (Tim Blake Nelson) and is successful in returning home. During the course of the journey, Mary grudgingly begins to respect Briggs. One night, after drinking, he tells Mary about his time in the Army and ends up his story with a song and a jig.
The group runs across the grave of an 11-year-old girl which has been desecrated. The body is gone. Mary insists on staying to restore the grave, but Briggs moves on. After restoring the grave, Mary tries to follow Briggs, but gets lost and wanders the prairie for two nights. Upset after her experience, she proposes to Briggs, who rejects her.
Forging on and trying to find food for the entourage, Briggs runs across a hotel and attempts to get rooms and food for the women, but the owner Aloysius Duffy (James Spader) refuses to put them up. Briggs returns later that night and burns down the hotel.
The group eventually makes their way to Hebron, Iowa, and the women are delivered to Altha Carter (Meryl Streep) for care.
The Homesman is an engaging but disturbing film that addresses the plight of women on the frontier who have gone west not knowing the incredible hardships and soul-breaking isolation of life on the prairie. The scenes depicting the circumstances causing the women’s breakdowns, and the actual mental collapses, are harrowing. Losing three children within days of each from diphtheria, fearing starvation, and suffering chronic sexual abuse were terrible and unexpected consequences of settling a hostile frontier without preparation.
On the same tack, Mary Bee Cuddy, a woman who can handle the challenges of the plains as well—or better—as any man, who owns property, runs a prosperous farm, is an intelligent and compassionate member of the community, feels unfulfilled because she is thirty-one and single. The social expectations of the times dictated that women are homemakers and mothers—and very little more. Mary is caught in a social chasm—she cannot fill the role of a man without coming under suspicion, and as long as she remains a spinster, she will always be an outsider—a misfit. Her decision to take the women east crosses that chasm. It is a man’s job that no man thinks is very important. As a woman, Mary recognizes the struggles of the demented women.
Hilary Swank’s portrayal of Mary Bee Cuddy is nothing short of brilliant. The façade of her outward affability and competence slowly begins to crack as she takes on the journey. Swank gives a perfectly calibrated performance of a woman dancing on the edge of heartrending despair. She is alone, unloved, and unappreciated, and Swank’s performance reveals her anguish only sparingly as it leaks through her tightly buttoned exterior. Her eyes only betray her disappointment and pain fitfully—against her will—and Hilary Swank conveys that emotional turmoil perfectly.
Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed the film, plays George Briggs with a mixture of heroism, opportunism, selfishness, and empathy. He is a claim jumper, a thief, a murderer, and an arsonist who is also a gentleman, a pragmatist, and—of all things—a moralist. Jones captures all these qualities under a veneer of common sense and plain talk. Like a classic Western hero, Briggs says what he means, and does not balk at saving people’s feeling when he does it. Jones, as he nearly always does, pulls off the portrayal with humor, intelligence, and aplomb.
Jones’ direction is also right on the money. The sparse landscapes and the harrowing scenes of the women’s breakdowns hit the perfect note for the melancholy subject matter. His feel for the actors and subject matter is nothing short of brilliant. The supporting actors, including Tim Blake Nelson, Meryl Streep, William Fitchner, Barry Corbin, and Hailee Steinfeld are nothing short of superb.
The Homesman is a harrowing look into the past, examining the almost unbearable hardships of prairie life for women. Frontier life robbed lives, hearts, and souls. Even strong and righteous women like Mary Bee Cuddy had to fight tooth and nail for their very sanity. This is a film that is not easy to watch, but one that is definitely worth seeing.