The Homesman

The Homesman (15)

USA 2014 123 minutes  Dir: Tommy Lee Jones  Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter, Meryl Streep

There’s been no shortage of whiny liberal hand-wringing over whether Tommy Lee Jones’s belated follow-up to his much-admired The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a feminist western or a misogynist western. A third view might be that it is neither of these depressing alternatives, but simply deploys a realistic depiction of the plight of women in the Old West as the context for an odd couple adventure that is, for the most part, as old as them thar hills (or at least as old as John Huston’s The African Queen, anyway), without seeking to impose any revisionist ideological agenda. The producer’s credit for Luc Besson might also lead one to fear that Hilary Swank will swiftly strip down to her tight-fitting sexy undies and take out leering prospectors with a gun in each hand in one of his preposterous and disingenuous ‘girl power’ action flicks. Mercifully, we don’t get that either.

Tough-as-old-boots frontierswoman Mary Bee Cuddy (Swank) is plain and bossy. We know this because two ungallant gentlemen say so, separately, to her face. Jones’s character opts for the more poetic phrase “plain as an old tin pail”, but we’ll come to him in a minute. The lonely, pious spinster is unable to bag herself a husband, despite eschewing romance in her appeals to logic. When three local women (Gummer, Otto, Richter) are driven insane by grief, loss and the rigours of frontier life (one of them chucks her newborn sprog down the outdoors dunny), Mary draws the short straw – or, more accurately, the black bean – and is committed to transport them back east to civilisation in a reinforced wagon. She saves the life of claim-jumping army deserter George Briggs (Jones) on condition that this grumpy, slippery ne’er-do-well accompanies them on the long journey from Nebraska to Iowa.

Jones seems to have spent much of his recent career biding his time until he’s old enough to play irascible, ornery old coots and has now aged splendidly into the role of George Briggs. He’s well matched by Swank, who brings out the underlying vulnerability in a character who might otherwise have come across as an insufferable prig. What you’d expect is that the mismatched twosome will warm towards one another during their episodic journey, which is pretty much what happens as they encounter lecherous cowboys and menacing Injuns (who are depicted neither as brutal savages nor noble stewards of the earth, but merely another hazard to be negotiated with as little bloodshed as possible). A welcome and dramatic late plot twist shakes up this apparent surrender to formula and is certain to provoke many a post-screening discussion. There’s no great dramatic story arc for the trio of madwomen, Gummer, Otto and Richter merely being required to stare into space blankly and self-harm or lash out every so often. But to give them an uplifting resolution would be dishonest in a film whose greatest strength is arguably its refusal to pander to modern sensibilities and expectations. Oh, and in case you’re beginning to wonder what happened to Meryl Streep, she only shows up for the last 15 minutes. Thanks for popping in, Meryl.