Hillary Swank in The Homesman

Review: The Homesman

The Homesman showed up recently on Netflix. I watched immediately.

The movie annoyed me. And the more I think about it, the more annoyed I become.

Spoilers ahead.

detail from the poster for The Homesman

I can see why Tommy Lee Jones made this movie. He wrote it, he directed it, and he took the lead part. His character redeems himself in heroic fashion, saves the helpless crazy ladies, and becomes a good guy.

I don’t understand what drew Hilary Swank or the other women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter) to their parts. Meryl Streep is even in this film!

The plot is that 3 women on the frontier go nuts from the hardships of frontier life. They become passive, mute, mere shells. Since there are no responsible men around, Mary Bee Cuddy (Swank) will take them back across the river to Iowa and civilization where they can be cared for.

Along the way she recruits help from George Briggs (Jones) a wastrel without a moral thought in his head. She persuades him to do her bidding with a promise of a cash reward at the end.

That sounds like a woman power plot, doesn’t it? It isn’t. It’s the opposite.

The 3 insane women do nothing but sit around. They never talk. One sometimes snarls, one has a baby doll, one just sits. Women have suffered horrors forever – and still do. Frontier living may have driven some of them mad but not 3 at once. And a night alone on the prairie is not enough fear and danger to make a strong woman go crazy either. But they all do, conveniently, and the heroic male is the only one who can save them from their weakness and fragility.

Mary Bee is a single woman who asks 2 of the most worthless of men to marry her and give her children. They both turn her down. A single woman with a farm, property, stock, and a strong back is turned down as a marriage prospect in the middle of the prairie where no other women are available. That doesn’t track for me.

Neither does driving a wagon for days across the grasslands and never seeing a rabbit, an antelope, a pheasant or a fish in a creek. Food couldn’t have been that scarce.

I didn’t get really mad about the story until about 4/5 of the way through, when I realized how it was going to turn out. There are no strong women in this story, only a not-so-good-man. But, of course, even a not-so-good-man is better than a woman.

That’s the message of The Homesman that continues to annoy me.

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4 responses to “Review: The Homesman”

  1. Peter Sherlock Avatar

    How sad that this movie passed you by. I was drawn into it from the opening shots and did not distinguish between women and men, they were all humans who had bizarre things happen to them.

    It didn’t occur to me to count the number of people available etc in that arid land and I was happy to go along with the oddities such as Ms Cuddy hanging herself of the strange wholly isolated hotel even existing.

    I think the whole film was about the isolation all humans are subject to and the fact that Briggs carries on with his solo life all through shows that he accepts the reality.

    The people whose kids died, mother smelt and rich owner of isolated hotel tried to avoid the reality of us all.
    A top movie for me.

    1. Virginia DeBolt Avatar

      Your interpretation is probably closer to what the filmmaker intended than mine. I got stuck on coping with the male gaze.

  2. Dumbfounded Watcher Avatar
    Dumbfounded Watcher

    I agree with your entire take. The way Cuddy just suddenly starts going mad after what is assumed to be one night and day lost in the prairie before finding her way back to the group. 24hrs and they depict her as though she has absolutely no survival skills, despite starting the film as a strong woman who seemed to have sense and at least minimal common sense and stoicism to be willing to take the women in the first place, and completely alone at that before finding Briggs.
    She even tells Briggs that she has plans for her farm including planting harvest and other things that would indicate she is at least capable of doing hard work and hard work as a farmer no less.
    So suddenly she is face down on the horse acting like she is exhausted, she starts eating dried grass as though she would be starving to the point of taking a drastic measure such as this, yet they don’t depict it being any longer than 1-2 days..

    Cut to her arrival at camp and the absolute breakdown that ensues. Sure her character was a bit annoying and idealistic from the get go, but this just feels like a completely unwarranted 180 into a decline that was not adequately set up. By all accounts it basically insinuates she goes insane because she got lost for a couple days.
    Then she goes back to poor helpless woman asking this frankly awful selfish dude to marry her??? Okayyyy
    But the final kicker that just made me laugh was her standing nude over him and demanding he sleep with her. I’m sorry but I just did not see the character regression going that way. She suddenly has turned into a pitiful desperate woman acting like a teenager demanding attention from the guy who doesn’t like her.

    And of course the suicide made no sense, again no set up to indicate she was even suicidal, no explanation, just Griggs blaming the women when really it wasn’t their fault.

    Anyway this movie was so disappointing and it saddens me how dirty they did the female characters. When I realised these wonderful and well known actresses playing the 3 women literally did not speak the entire film I was gobsmacked.

    All I can say is I hope they got paid really well.

    1. Virginia DeBolt Avatar

      Exactly everything you said!

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