The Home­s­man

She is a lady of good finan­cial stand­ing and moral char­ac­ter. Her strong work eth­ic doesn’t over­shad­ow her know­ing fem­i­nin­i­ty. One day, she would like to start a fam­i­ly, but so far these plans have yet to come to fruition. She is 31 and lives alone. Her name is Mary Bee Cud­dy (Hilary Swank), a well-respect­ed woman liv­ing in a Nebras­ka ter­ri­to­ry named Loup. But in director/​star Tom­my Lee Jones’ new fea­ture, The Home­s­man, she is a social failure.

The west­ern genre hasn’t been kind to the fin­er sex. They’re often the object of affec­tion or the bane of someone’s exis­tence. But in Jones’ film, women are con­flict­ed beings wor­thy of a more com­plex con­sid­er­a­tion. The cen­tral nar­ra­tive fol­lows Mary Bee’s dan­ger­ous cross-coun­try quest to trans­fer three men­tal­ly strick­en matri­archs across state lines so that they can receive treat­ment and be free of their fed-up hus­bands. Using tropes per­fect­ed by Antho­ny Mann in The Naked Spur, Jones lit­ters this road film sce­nario with mul­ti­ple div­ots; direc­tions (phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal) change more than once depend­ing on sud­den shifts in char­ac­ter moti­va­tion and vio­lent exter­nal forces.

With­in this con­text, the female soul is con­stant­ly mis­un­der­stood, abused and exiled by the sur­round­ing rus­tic tableaux. Patri­archy isn’t entire­ly to blame; cow­ardice is the real root of evil in The Home­s­man. Sure, most of the film’s char­ac­ters are aggres­sive and igno­rant men (a species that will nev­er go extinct), but the sit­u­a­tion is far more com­pli­cat­ed than that. Look at the ear­ly scene in which Mary Bee vol­un­teers to accept the cross-coun­try assign­ment after one of the women’s hus­bands refus­es the job dur­ing a town church meet­ing; every per­son (man, woman and reli­gious beast) with­ers when pressed with the respon­si­bil­i­ty of being her sec­ond. Swank’s sad eyes sing a sin­gu­lar requiem of betrayal.

This is why Mary Bee ends up sav­ing an ornery louse named Brig­gs (Tom­my Lee Jones) from the hangman’s noose as a last ditch effort to find some kind of sup­port. Com­pli­ca­tions arise on their prairie odyssey with the two polar oppo­site arche­types bat­tling for artis­tic con­trol of this par­tic­u­lar mis­sion. There’s plen­ty of live­ly ban­ter between Brig­gs and Mary Bee, but Jones is far more con­cerned with inter­cut­ting flash­back sequences depict­ing each woman’s descent into mad­ness as the wag­on train treks east.

It is here we see the poignant rip­ples of their past trau­mas. While Jones’ pre­vi­ous film The Three Buri­als of Melquiades Estra­da focused on the glar­ing­ly flawed deci­sions by stressed blue-col­lar folk, The Home­s­man shifts its gaze toward the grav­i­ty and con­se­quence of every­day respon­si­bil­i­ty in the myth­i­cal Wild West.

Rodri­go Prieto’s lush and tex­tur­al visu­als make for a per­fect com­pli­ment to Mar­co Beltrami’s yearn­ing string score. Strik­ing long shots con­tain enough of the big sky to imply that heav­en is sim­ply but a glance away. But what makes The Home­s­man a west­ern of great mer­it and sub­stance isn’t its gor­geous win­dow-dress­ings or sly sub­ver­sions in iconog­ra­phy, but the emo­tion­al con­nec­tion it man­ages to con­vey through its con­tem­pla­tive treat­ment of gen­der, long­ing and how the two con­sis­tent­ly intertwine.