In its setting and in its blunt, unfussy style, director, co-writer and star Tommy Lee Jones’ “The Homesman” is a film out of time. It takes place in 1855, the year after the creation of the Nebraska Territory. Like Jones’ previous theatrical feature, the excellent “Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” “The Homesman” expands the conventional notion of what Westerns typically address in terms of story, geography and mythology.
This one’s a margin Western. Frustratingly uneven, rarely dull, it comes from Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel and deals with isolated characters living in the margins of history far away from the historic gunfights or Monument Valley or the Colorado Rockies.
We first see the virtuous single farm woman Mary Bee Cuddy behind a two-horse plow, and when you have Hilary Swank playing this sort of role, that’s a ton of virtue straight off. Described, relentlessly, by everyone else in the story as “bossy” and “plain,” Swank’s Cuddy has a bedrock integrity of purpose and, when the narrative calls for it, a nice way of glowing nude by the fireside. (So much for plain.)
Three women living nearby, presumably among many more, have gone insane with grief for grimly varying reasons. Cuddy embarks on a five-week trek to the Missouri River and then over to Iowa to drop the women with a reverend’s wife. She can’t do it alone, though. Early in the trip she happens upon the claim-jumping wretch George Briggs, played by Jones, about to hang. She cuts him down, and they turn into unlikely business partners on the cold, wintry trail east.
Swarthout’s conception of Cuddy is that of a Christian woman sorely tested by circumstance and by human yearning. Briggs is a scoundrel but not a heartless one. Swarthout’s other fiction titles range from “Where the Boys Are” to “The Shootist.” “The Homesman” is a peculiar and pungent entry on his resume. Over the years both Paul Newman and Sam Shepard tried to get film versions going. Jones succeeded, and although he can’t resolve the tonal change-ups — as a director he lets himself get away with murder in the mugging department — at heart this is a forlorn fable full of desperately sad people on the way to a place they hope is better.
The supporting cast asserts Jones’ drawing power. John Lithgow and Meryl Streep pop in as a reverend in Nebraska Territory and a warm-hearted minister’s wife in Hebron, Iowa, respectively; James Spader oozes distrustworthiness as a housing development salesman in the middle of nowhere; Tim Blake Nelson, like Spader one of Jones’ co-stars in the ensemble of “Lincoln,” is pitch-perfect (and genuinely funny) as a cowpoke trying to make off with one of the insane charges.
The script by Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver makes the mistake, I think, of marginalizing its trio of female lamentation. (The strange cargo is played by Mirando Otto, Sonja Richter and Grace Gummer; Gummer is the daughter of Meryl Streep.) Right or wrong, “The Homesman” belongs to Jones and Swank, and for Western aficionados it’s worth seeing.
The way Jones and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto shoot “The Homesman,” the stark landscapes (New Mexico and a bit of Georgia standing in for Nebraska and Iowa) recall various minor-key Westerns of the 1960s and ’70s.
Without giving anything away, the film ends not with a bang, not quite with a whimper, but with an odd little drunken revel, a mixed chord of regret and one last trip across the Missouri.
“The Homesman” – 2 1/2 stars
MPAA rating: R (for violence, sexual content, some disturbing behavior and nudity)
Running time: 2:00
Opens: Friday
