Review of The Homesman (2014) by Manny C — 21 Dec 2014

This feminist centered Western from actor-director/co-writer Tommy Lee Jones is bursting with twists. Hilary Swank is terrific as Mary Bee Cuddy, who runs a farm in Nebraska. She isn't married, but it's not for lack of trying. The other farmers find her too plain and tall. But Mary Bee has loads of spunk. She volunteers to use her wagon to transport three frontier women back to Iowa where a minister's wife (a great cameo from Meryl Streep) will provide shelter for these so-called 'cuckoo clocks'. Arabella (Grace Gummer) lost three children to diphtheria; Theoline (Miranda Otto) killed her own child, and Gro (Sonja Richter) needs an exorcist apparently. Mary Bee needs assistance, which she gets in the form of George Briggs (Jones), an Army deserter who prefers to work with women instead of being hanged. But just barely.

The Homesman doesn't have the same scope and depth of Jones' amazing 2005 directorial debut The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, but Jones and Swank walk the tightrope between the comic and the tragic and largely succeed. These two are dynamite together.