'Homesman' is a bunch of malarkey
Set on the Great Plains in the mid-1800s, The Homesman aims for a story that's poignant and told sparely, but comes across as mawkish, tedious and self-indulgent.
A dull Western with bizarre characterizations, it throws together upright homesteader Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) and scruffy drifter George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones, who also directs) in a dusty frontier saga (* 1/2 out of four; rated R; opens Friday in select cities).
Cuddy is a stalwart spinster who has kindly offered to transport three women driven crazy by their punishing pioneer existence across the Nebraska Territories to Iowa, where they can be re-united with their families.
She runs across Briggs hanging from a tree, punished for jumping another man's claim, and makes a swift decision. Realizing she needs help for the arduous wagon trek, she cuts Briggs down and makes him promise to help transport them. He grudgingly agrees, and a bland, testy friendship is forged.
The three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto and Sonja Richter) are one-dimensional. In fact, all of the women in this movie fall into two reductive categories: strong but plain, and once-attractive and crazy.
Men repeatedly tell Cuddy how bossy she, but she doggedly perseveres in trying to convince them to marry her. What she hears in response is that she's "plain as an old tin pail." She speaks glowingly of her native New York, and it's never clear why she made the trip on her own to windswept prairie country in the first place.
Her intrepid character, taken from a novel by Glendon Swarthout, had the potential to be intriguing, but onscreen her image is muddled. The story attempts to show how hard it was for women in the Old West, but it ends up being Jones' surly show. Director Jones should not have put actor Jones front and center in a movie that is purportedly about pioneer women.
The three mentally ill women are only shown cradling rag dolls or raging nonsensically. We get only tidbits of their back stories and little sense of how they relate to one another, or to Cuddy and Briggs. They're mostly shown staring blankly, chained to the wagon, eating or sleeping.
Swank brings a gravitas to her character that is undermined when some of her antics are played for laughs. In a 10-minute cameo, Meryl Streep's character is more fully developed than any of the leads' roles.
The film never delves deeply enough and is made even worse by clashing tones. At times melodramatic and grim, and at other times comedic and even silly, The Homesman is out of place on every level.