The Homesman (2014)

THE HOMESMAN  (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Tommy Lee Jones
    Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Grace Gummer,
    Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter, Barry Corbin, 
    William Fichtner, John Lithgow, Tim Blake Nelson,
    James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Meryl Streep
There's a pattern emerging in the films of Tommy Lee Jones, one he's been cultivating off and on for years. He likes movies about obsessed characters who go on long, quixotic journeys in the American West. His sense of humor is morbid and his overall outlook is dark. Consider that in both "Lonesome Dove" and "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada", he played men transporting corpses great distances in the wilderness heat. And while that's not quite what he's up to in "The Homesman", his mission is just about as grim. The story begins in a small farming community in Nebraska, where the womenfolk are going mad in a real bad way. It's agreed that three of them need to go to a church in Iowa, where a minister's wife played by Meryl Streep will know what to do with them. The person assigned to get them there is a stubborn, self-reliant spinster named Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), and if you don't think a woman is up to the job, you haven't seen many Hilary Swank movies. Cuddy can't do it alone, though, so she enlists George Briggs, a claim-jumping thief played by Jones, to help out. At the moment they meet, he's about to be hanged. Their relationship will have a terrible symmetry. Mostly bad things happen in this, not to make a point or for any particular reason, but because events play out in a random way sometimes, accidents or just plain carelessness leading to tragedy. Briggs and Cuddy both seem a little crazy, too. She's bossy and inflexible, bluntly proposing marriage to any man who crosses her path. (The men, who are no prizes, invariably dismiss her as plain, which suggests a need for corrective vision, if you ask me.) Briggs is simply and unapologetically beyond redemption. He knows what he is and knows he won't change and knows enough not to pretend. He might show a glimmer of nobility now and then, but not enough to keep him from going to hell, which he'll no doubt do, more or less directly, if he can just get these three wailing lunatics and this bossy old maid to Iowa first.