Review: The Homesman
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Homeward Bound: Hillary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones in The Homesmen
City Paper guide: B
Tommy Lee Jones has finally found a director who can bring out his best: himself. Especially in the early scenes of The Homesman, a feminist Western adapted from the novel by Glendon Swarthout, there’s a lively playfulness we haven’t seen from him in years, and possibly decades. Unfortunately, that lightness evaporates as he and Hillary Swank, a single woman who’s taken up residence in the Nebraska territory, squire three insane women — Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto and Sonja Richter — toward the Iowa border, as the land grows hard and the movie grows harder. Swank, whose marriage proposal is rebuffed by a toothless man who calls her “just plum plain,” lives squarely in her character’s period-appropriate desperation to find a man with whom to settle down, although the failure to explain how she came by her unusual situation, or the significant fortune she seems to hold, leaves the part feeling half-finished — as, eventually, does The Homesman itself. The abrupt turn that starts the final act doesn’t help, effectively undoing what the movie’s built thus far and letting an off-the-shelf action sequence intrude like an unneeded cowboy savior.
