The Homesman

On the DVD version of Tommy Lee Jones' The Homesman, one of the "making of" featurettes expends much time, if not much energy, in a listless debate as to whether the 2014 film is a "Western."  For reasons obscure to me, Jones and several of his stars, including John Lithgow, argue that the film is not a Western -- they seem to regard that label as demeaning.  In fact, by any reasonable definition, The Homesman is a Western and a particularly beautiful, grave, and distinguished representative of that genre.  The film's premise is simple and powerful:  in 1850's Nebraska territory, near a god-forsaken place called Loup, three women (and possibly another as well) have gone insane, partially the result of a "terrible" winter.  Someone, a "homesman," has to take the three women across the prairie, a completely featureless wasteland, to the Missouri River and civilization defined as Hebron, Iowa.  (Hebron turns out to be a 1850's version of Marianne Robertson's Gilead, the underground railroad station of Tabor, Iowa).  An independent and headstrong woman, Mary Bee Cuddy, agrees to transport the women through the dangerous wilderness -- to this end, she is given a kind of paddy wagon with barred windows and iron hooks to which her three madwomen can be tethered.  Several heartbreaking scenes establish the reasons for the women's insanity:  all of them have been completely isolated on the relentlessly windy and treeless plains, trapped in the situation that so famously drove Lillian Gish mad in an early representative of this kind of film, Victor Sjostrom's 1926 The Wind.  One woman has been relentlessly raped by her husband; another has lost three children to diphtheria in one day; a third has thrown her newborn baby away in an outhouse.  All of them are speechless, feral, weird sisters who moan sometimes, and scuffle with one another -- they are all young and have the look of particularly forsaken, and savage, pre-Raphaelite madonnas.  After a few days of travel, Cuddy encounters a deserter from the dragoons, an illiterate claim-jumper named George Briggs played by Tommy Lee Jones.  He has been placed on a horse with a noose around his neck to be hanged.  (Briggs has taken over the sod-house of one of the pioneers, a man who has gone back East to find a wife after rejecting Mary Bee Cuddy's marriage proposal -- she has a habit of making sudden, impetuous marriage proposals that are always rejected because she is "plain as an old tin cup".  In fact, the role is played impeccably by the handsome, if angular, Hillary Swank). Cuddy agrees to pay Briggs, who is a filthy reprobate, $300 dollars if he will accompany her on the dangerous journey to Hebron, Iowa.  The rest of the film chronicles their journey and the film assumes some of the characteristics of John Huston's The African Queen -- Swank plays the spinster's role that Katherine Hepburn acted in Huston's film; Tommy Lee Jones plays the Bogart part and the rattling, wheezing paddy-wagon stands in for the decrepit steamer in the earlier movie.  Jones' directs the film in a blunt, minimalist style -- in the featurettes, there is talk of his interest in the sculptures of Donald Judd -- suppressing most of the emotion and staging the various dangerous encounters on the road to Hebron in a casual, almost indifferent way.  As in most great Westerns, terrain and landscape are central to the picture's concerns and the film contains several sequences of great, if understated, lyricism -- paradoxically, a scene of the Cuddy and Briggs supervising the mad women's morning urination forms a spectacular wide-screen tableaux against the enormous and fatal plain; we see Cuddy bathing the nude women in a rippling stream an image that later rhymes with a scene of the madwomen suddenly springing to life to rescue one of their group who has fallen in the swift current in a river, a pyramidal composition of the principal characters in the grip of the river that is a fine emblem for human solidarity; finally, there is a great image that could have been painted by George Caleb Bingham showing a man dancing on a ferry as it crosses the broad Missouri at night.  As it turns out, the privations of the prairie have driven everyone more or less mad -- as the movie progresses, it turns out that no one is completely sane:  there is a shocking revelation about three-quarters of the way through the film that is a total surprise and, at one point, Briggs coolly lights a hotel that has spurned him on fire and watches as the inhabitants burn to death -- he kills a half-dozen people for some ham to feed the witch-like madwomen.  Cuddy gets lost on the plain when a horse unfamiliar to her spins around a dozen times and, apparently, sets off in the wrong direction -- the scene is alarming because the wilderness is completely featureless, similar to an equally frightening scene in Kurosawa's great Mongolian Western, Dersu Uzula.  The script is beautifully constructed as a series of echoes:  the discovery of a lone grave on the prairie is referenced in the end of the film when Briggs returns west with a grave-marker carved in wood that ends up thrown into the Missouri River.  There are two matching scenes of people having sex with others in unnervingly close proximity.  A band of wild Pawnee Indians rhymes with an earlier scene showing burial scaffolds on the desolate, windy plain.  The minor characters are all observed with great precision and, within its parameters, the film is flawless.  The promise of manifold destiny and the golden West is revealed as a hollow and deadly sham:  Briggs warns a young woman to whom he pointlessly proposes marriage (echoing Miss Cuddy's sudden and hopelessly prosaic marriage proposals earlier in the film) to stay away from men who want to pioneer the West: "Go East," he tells her.  But in the movie's final scene, we see him westbound again, "lighting out for the territories" on a ferry moving into the darkness of the Nebraska wilderness -- like the outlaw in the primordial Western, The Great Train Robbery, Briggs aims his big revolver right at the camera and fires it.  The Western is the most beautiful and noble of American film genres and this film is a worthy addition to that canon.  And, I suppose, I should weigh in on the question of what defines a Western -- Westerns are films premised upon the notion that man's struggle with an indifferent, hostile wilderness highlights the importance of a moral code in the face of lawlessness:  these films typically involve a trek through dangerous territory culminating in some kind of confrontation between the forces of civilization (feminine, lawful order -- the tapestry piano that Cuddy pathetically spreads to play during her musical soirees in the sod hut) and the forces of violent disorder (the outlaw freighter who rapes one of the crazy ladies and gets his head blown-off, the Indians, the scruffy, cowardly vigilantes who want to hang a man but are too cowardly to get the deed done.)