THE HOMESMAN
Roadside Attractions and Saban Films
Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: B+
Director: Tommy Lee Jones
Screenwriter: Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, Wesley A. Oliver, based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Grace Gummer, Mirando Otto, Sonja Richter,
Hailee Steinfeld, James Spader, Meryl Streep
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 11/4/14
Opens: November 14, 2014
Say what you will about the problems of American aviation—miserable leg room, terrible food (if food is even served), cancellations, bad scheduling, delays—if you were around in 1854 you’d say “Where is Jet Blue now that we need it (and we’ll accept it with all these problems”)? Folks like George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) and fellow travelers Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer), Theoline Belknapp (Miranda Otto) and Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter), would give anything even for a broken-down Yugo car. They needed to travel from the Nebraska territory to Iowa—and remember that Iowa was right on Nebraska’s border, not a thousand miles away—a journey that took them five weeks to complete on horse-drawn wagon. A flight from Omaha to Des Moines with the obligatory stop along the way would take three and one-half hours.
Nor did Briggs and Cuddy enjoy a non-stop trip between Nebraska and Iowa. In an episodic drama directed by Tommy Lee Jones and starring him as well, “The Homesman,” based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel of the same name, the five travelers of varying temperaments were to have more problems with one another than you would have had seated near the middle of a four-across plane trip with two three-hundred pounders on each side of you.
The purpose of the trip was to transport three women to their original homes, the trio having become psychotic allegedly because of the hard work and dangers faced by settlers who went West to a land five times as large as the present Nebraska state, one inhabited principally by Indians, fur traders and beavers. The land was free, first-come, first-served. You might have eked out an existence farming the land and you had to watch out for Indians, as did the folks on the pilgrimage taken by the four women and one man who set forth to deposit three of their members “back East,” which seems to have meant Iowa, where a clergyman’s wife (Meryl Streep) is willing to take them in the nutcases.
Hilary Swank anchors the show as Mary Bee Cuddy, a strong, unmarried woman of thirty-one who lives alone in a log cabin, having acquired more land than her neighbors but who has considerable difficulty finding a man to marry. Not that she was choosy. She even proposed to two, but unfortunately for her she was, as one character put it, “As plain as an old tin can.” Though her minister, Reverend Dowd (John Lithgow), agrees that she is strong enough to undertake they journey, she is desperate for a man to accompany her, which she finds in George Briggs (Jones), receiving from him a promise to be her assistant in return for having his life saved from a hanging for claim jumping.
As they proceed across the flat western land, they meet a group of Indians who are amendable to bribes, The Freighter (Tim BlakeNelson), a fellow who fights Briggs to the death over one of the crazy women, and the owner of a hotel, Alysius Duffy (James Spader) who denies them rooms despite a full house of vacancies. Aside from Briggs’ melodramatic action in shooting a man in the foot and burning down his hotel with the owner inside the entire time, “The Homesman” is slow-moving, but stands out not only for its impeccable acting but for its picture of what the West was really like at about the middle of the Nineteenth Century. There are no wild Indian fights with the cavalry coming to the rescue amid blasts of a bugle. This is not the West of Gene Autry, Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers but instead is one in which character, not mindless action, is studied. For the right audience, meaning for those not insistent on checking their brains at the popcorn stand, “The Homesman” is as authentic a portrayal of an America before iPhones, cars, phones and electric lights made us so comfortable that we can afford to grouse about an indifferent staff aboad American Airlines.
Rated R. 122 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B
Acting – A
Technical – B+
Overall B+
