Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank
“THE HOMESMAN” My rating: B+
122 minutes | MPAA rating: R
At age 68, Tommy Lee Jones is not going gently.
His recent selection of film roles — “No Country for Old Men,” “The Company Men,” “In the Valley of Elah” — have found him facing the dark side of human nature (not to mention the darkness at the end of the line) with varying degrees of resistance and resignation.
His choices as an auteur are even bleaker. He made his directing debut in 2005 with the angry, violent “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” playing an American rancher transporting his friend’s body to Mexico for burial.
With his sophomore effort, “The Homesman,” Jones gives us a revisionist Western that defies expectations at every turn.
It’s a genuine art film in the vein of Aussie productions like “The Proposition.” Moreover, “The Homesman” embraces a world view as bleak as anything in Cormack McCarthy.
Hilary Swank is Mary Bee Cuddy, a single woman operating her own small farm in the Nebraska Territory of the 1850s. In the opening scene she proposes marriage to her closest neighbor, a fellow eight or nine years her junior. For her effort Mary Bee is rejected as “homely and bossy.” Well, she is definitely both. But she is also, as she says, “uncommonly alone.”
The plot of “The Homesman” is kicked into gear by three local women (Miranda Otto, Grace Gummer, Sonja Richter) who all have gone mad during a miserable Nebraska winter. Continue Reading »
