Tommy Lee Jones (2014)

The early scenes of The Homesman, set in the American Midwest in the 1850s, show the men mostly as nasty and/or feeble, the women as decent and/or suffering.   This is true of a scene featuring the story’s principal female character, Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), and Bob Giffen (Evan Jones), her neighbour in a small farming community in Nebraska Territory.  It’s equally the case in the sequences that summarise the circumstances in which three other local women begin to show, as a result of the hardships and traumas of their lives, signs of serious mental illness:  Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter), whose behaviour is the most obviously disturbing and violent of the trio, has been raped by her husband Thor (David Dencik).  Mary Bee gives Bob Giffen a dinner of fried chicken followed by peach pie, made, she tells him, with canned peaches.  ‘It’s a good pie’, he replies, with his mouth full of it.  Mary Bee, a former teacher from New York, suggests some ‘post-prandial entertainment’.  Her guest gawps – he hasn’t a clue what she means.  She sings, her fingers moving on a piece of needlework that’s designed as a piano keyboard.  Mary Bee then proposes marriage to Giffen.  She has some money and she owns some land.  She suggests it would be in both their interests for Giffen and her to pool resources, although she realises she’s a ‘plain’ woman.  The proposal sends Giffen packing.

The local minister, Reverend Dowd (John Lithgow), a little pompous and self-satisfied but a cut above the other local men in evidence, arranges for the three insane women to be delivered to a fellow clergyman in Hebron, Iowa, whose church cares for the mentally ill.  The women’s menfolk (the other two husbands are played by William Fichtner and Jesse Plemons) and Mary Bee draw lots to decide who will take them to Iowa, and Mary Bee draws the short straw (or black bean, as it actually is):  although she’s drawn on behalf of herself and one of the women’s husbands in absentia, Mary Bee decides that the latter is the last man to be trusted with the mission and she agrees to transport them alone.   Shortly after setting out on the journey, she comes upon an older man, on horseback but with a noose, hanging from a tree, round his neck:  if the horse moves, he’ll die.  This is George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), who’s been lynched by a group of other men, including Thor Svendsen, for ‘claim-jumping’.  Briggs snivels and pleads pathetically for help and Mary Bee saves his life in exchange for his agreeing to accompany her to Hebron.  Once he’s free, Briggs warns Mary Bee that he considers himself free also to abandon her and the other women, whenever he pleases.

In this first part of The Homesman – which Tommy Lee Jones, with Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver, adapted from a novel of the same name by Glendon Swarthout (1918-1992) – the privations and abuses suffered by women, as a result of the harsh environment in which they live and their treatment by men, are made very clear.  The film has consequently generated discussion about whether it’s a ‘feminist Western’ (or, to be more accurate, ‘Midwestern’).  Once the wagon is en route to Iowa, however, the three crazy women – Gro, Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer) and Theoline Belknapp (Miranda Otto) – register less and less as individuals:  they’re rather the reason for Mary Bee and Briggs to travel together.  The women’s behaviour makes an instant impact and may enable a particular incident in the story but it doesn’t influence or reverberate in what happens next follows.  Gro’s continuous shouting continues just long enough for Tommy Lee Jones to establish that it gets on Mary Bee’s nerves – and to prevent it getting on the audience’s nerves.   A little later, Gro, left alone with a sewing needle, inserts it in her wrist and arm and her bare breast:  Jones has already shown Mary Bee bathing the other three women, implying that this happens regularly, but there’s no follow-up to Gro’s self-harming.  (That early scene in which Bob Giffen wolfs down a piece of peach pie but leaves the rest as soon as the next line of dialogue arrives anticipates a persistent fault of the film’s direction.)  The Homesman has an effective score by Marco Beltrami and is often impressive to look at.  Rodrigo Prieto’s wide-angle photography conveys the intimidating scale and emptiness of the landscape through which Mary Bee’s wagon moves but her passengers too are rendered increasingly as images.    Grace Gummer is the most striking of the three, and holds on to hints of a particular personality.  Gummer’s look suggests something almost physically blocking Arabella from functioning normally, whereas Sonja Richter and Miranda Otto are aestheticised crazies.

The trek across the Nebraska prairies into Iowa takes several weeks.  There’s an encounter with Pawnee.  Arabella wanders off and is captured by a man, whom she shoots dead just as he’s about to strangle Briggs, who has tried to rescue Arabella.  But not a lot else happens:  this is believable of course but you’re given no sense of the journey’s boring arduousness.  The film drags until,  one night, Mary Bee proposes to Briggs – making the same arguments she made to Bob Giffen – and, when Briggs refuses, this devout Christian virgin presents herself naked to him and begs that they ‘lie together’  He reluctantly agrees and they have sex.  When he wakes the next morning, he finds that Mary Bee has both come to her God-fearing senses and lost her mind:  she has hanged herself.   I’m not a fan of Hilary Swank:  she’s a strong but unnuanced performer – as Mary Bee, she’s been skilfully made up to look as plain as the woman keeps insisting she is but she’s not particularly spinsterish and, when Mary Bee insists on reburying the body of a young girl whose grave has been ransacked and says a prayer for the child, it’s an actress praying.  It’s startling, nevertheless, when Mary Bee suddenly disappears from the film.  The sudden switch of focus onto George Briggs almost exclusively has caused some reviewers to condemn Tommy Lee Jones’s ‘feminism’ as superficial.

The criticism is understandable – not least because it’s at this stage that Jones the actor comes into his own (though the reviews I’ve read haven’t acknowledged this).  His famously craggy features are, nowadays, a landscape in themselves; his grouchy wit and candour have already enlivened the journey somewhat; but it’s in the wake of Mary Bee’s suicide, in his delineation of Briggs’s anger with his mad cargo and with himself, and his growing sense of remorse and realisation of the dead woman’s courage, that Tommy Lee Jones provides the main reason for sitting through The Homesman.  He’s splendid in an extended sequence in which Briggs tries unsuccessfully to get food and accommodation for himself and the others at a hotel in the middle of nowhere and, after having been rebuffed by the obnoxious manager (overplayed by James Spader), returns to burn the place down and steal a roast pig on his way out.   He does a weirdly compelling dance in the film’s final sequence, as Briggs boards a barge to take his leave of Iowa.  In the meantime, he has encountered two further women and the viewer has enjoyed the cameos of Meryl Streep and Hailee Steinfeld in these roles.  As a teenage girl who works in the Hebron boarding house where Briggs stays, Steinfeld has a fine simplicity and directness.  Streep is Mrs Carter, the wife of the minister of the church who will take the women in.  The sequence in which she appears is unsatisfactory:  Briggs’s reticence about how the trio Mrs Carter has bade take a seat in her living room might behave feels like a careless omission in the script rather than something Briggs chooses not to mention.  But Meryl Streep, in a very few minutes on screen, tells you a good deal about Mrs Carter:  she’s rather coolly compassionate towards, and no less curious about, the women; she’s flustered by their arrival and amiably decisive in her dismissal of Briggs.  And her praying is just right.

25 November 2014