 |
| Hilary Swank gits r done in The Homesman. |
««1/2 The Homesman. Written by Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald &
Wesley A. Oliver, based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout. Directed by Tommy Lee
Jones. At selected theaters.
In a political landscape dominated by arguments subtle
enough to fit on bumper stickers, one of the oldest is "A woman needs a
man like a fish needs a bicycle." First coined by Australian
writer-activist Irina Dunn, it's a classic and maybe the most silly, because
five million years of evolution attest to the fact that, yes, most women do need
men.
The question haunts Tommy Lee Jones' new anti-Western, The Homesman. I say
"anti-Western" because the movie focuses not on the conquest of the
frontier, but a retreat from it. Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is a "fish
without a bicycle" type—an intelligent, resourceful woman perfectly up to
busting the sod on her Nebraska farm and setting a fine dinner table when she
aims to. Unmarried but seeking, she approaches men not as a romantic suppliant,
but as an equal with a business proposition. So formidable is Miss Mary Bee
that she volunteers for a task none of the men in her town will touch: to
escort three deranged frontier wives (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja
Richter) through hundreds of miles of lawless territory to Iowa, where they
will find rest and refuge from their clueless husbands. On the way, she rescues
claim jumper George Briggs (Jones) from the end of a lynch-rope, but at a price
of helping her accomplish her errand of mercy.
Novelist and "Cowboy Hall of Fame" member Glendon
Swarthout (The Shootist, Where the Boys Are) crafted an
interesting premise when he wrote the book in the 1980's. The movie rights were owned for years by Paul
Newman, who never was able to get the project made. The Homesman then became a passion project for Jones, who directed
this version himself.
There's no question that the film has all of the elements it
needed to succeed. Foremost is Hilary Swank, who has made a career of playing
women struggling against the petty limitations of gender. No less
impressive here as she was in Boys Don't
Cry or Million Dollar Baby, she
gives Mary Bee a dignity that reads as almost Lincolnesque, but with a core of
vulnerability that makes her strength all the more appealing. She makes an
interesting match with Jones' gristled anti-hero, who makes a career of
traversing his own kinds of boundaries. They're different enough—and share
enough—to be good dance partners.
Jones has shot his film sparely, as if trying to distill
some kind of classically tragic essence. In this context, the three damaged
women they escort become a kind of mute chorus, responding to what they see in
the only rational fashion insanity deserves.
So why isn't The
Homesman better? Perhaps more than any other recent film I can think of, it
goes off the rails in one fell swoop, with a turn in the plot that shouldn't be
spoiled here. Suffice it to say that Swank's character needs men after all. She
departs the story in a sudden fashion that is neither sufficiently prepared
for, nor adequately explained. Swarthout might have done so in the book (which
I haven't read), which Jones may have lived with long enough to believe was
clear enough. But on the screen, it isn't—at least without a goodly amount of post hoc rationalization.
It's a shame. Though the Western is often thought of as a
spent genre, it is a quintessentially American one, big enough to contain
themes that are still relevant. Those gunslingers and cowboys were the original
superheroes, the Indians the original "others" who turn out not to be
so alien. (Star Trek, incidentally,
was originally sold as a "space Western"). The story of women in the
West is a vast, largely unexplored universe. Jones may have finished this
journey, but he missed an opportunity by leaving its soul behind.
©
2014 Nicholas Nicastro
No comments:
Post a Comment