The Homesman

When we think of the “revisionist Western” genre, the implication is usually one of Peckinpah-esque ultraviolence or Dead Man artiness. Tommy Lee Jones’ unexpectedly devastatingThe Homesman, while hardly lacking for flashes of brutal violence or moments of equally brutal introspection, takes a slightly different approach to its revisionist vision of the Old West. It is a film about the western landscape as a psychological nightmare, and in its deepest and darkest moments, The Homesman questions how insanity should be defined in a world as savage and lonely as the one it depicts.

It’s entertainment, filled with moving performances and powerful visuals. But Jones, who also adapted the Glendon Swarthout novel with screenwriters Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver, only leads the viewer down comforting alleys in order to ambush them with ugly truths. The film is structured in a manner that is daring but not showy, allowing flashbacks and visions to slash into the narrative. All the beauty and promise of the landscapes has become an unconquerable world of desolation and death.

The Homesman is the second film directed by the Oscar-winning actor Jones – his directorial debut was 2005’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, another breed of revisionist Western – but here he displays the wisdom and confidence of a battle-scarred veteran. Jones also stars in The Homesman, and he gives one of his best performances in years. He also gets brilliant work from Hilary Swank as Mary Bee Cuddy, a lonely spinster working her own land in the barren Nebraska Territory, described by an elderly friend as “a better man than any man in these parts.”

As the film opens, Mary is attempting to rope one of the local oafs into marriage, proposing a union of “land, animals, implements, lives,” with all the passion of a contract negotiation. He rejects her in order to find a bride back east, but like many settlers unprepared for the bleak life on the range, he ends up deserting his homestead altogether. In fact, a mental fatigue and psychological sickness seems to have infected the entire populace, especially the town’s women. In short order, three of the farmers’ wives go insane – a teenage girl who lost numerous babies goes catatonic; a viciously oppressed wife has visions of her dead mother; and in the film’s most disturbing moment, a woman chucks her newborn baby into the bottom of an outhouse well.

A decision is made to escort the women several hundred miles to Missouri, so that they may be returned to their families. When the women’s husbands all prove unwilling or unable to make the journey, Mary heroically volunteers for the task. She comes across Jones, left for dead by the town fathers after he is found squatting on a deserted homestead, and saves his life in exchange for his help on the journey. Along the way, his loutish behavior and cynical worldview clashes with her uptight and brittle nature.

That may sound like the set-up for a Two Mules for Sister Sara-style goof, and those mismatched partner clichés are present in the opening half, but The Homesman has greater ambitions. The proximity to the mad women, and to the savagery of the wilderness, also begins to affect Mary’s sanity, which may have been drastically frayed before the journey even began. As they travel further from the imaginary values of civilization, Mary’s compassion comes to look like a form of insanity. Meanwhile, her matrimonial longings seem less mercenary and more like a desperate cry for tenderness in a world where no one is your friend, and where home is your prison.

THE HOMESMAN (4) Directed by Tommy Lee Jones • Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, John Lithgow • Rated R • 122 min. • At Osio Cinemas.