Film Review: The Homesman

On its surface, this gritty and dark story is about a woman who undertakes to deliver three women who have become mentally ill while homesteading the Nebraska plains in 1854. Underneath that framework, the message is about the realities of pioneering Plains life and the hardness of character required to survive there.  This is a topic I have written about before. The screenplay was adapted from the novel by Glendon Swarthout.

The community from whence these people started is very small, and it has no resources to care for these three women who have become violently disturbed. The preacher decides the community must start these women on a journey back to their families in the “east” by delivering them to the care of a minister’s wife in a settlement along the Missouri River in Iowa. This is quite some distance away by wagon and through unsettled, undeveloped territory.  In the year the story purportedly takes place, Nebraska had really not been settled yet – people in any numbers to settle and farm in that territory were still ten or even twenty years in the future.  For the most part, no resources were present to assist travelers along their way, except along the Overland Trail route.

The preacher meets with the townsfolk in the church to decide which of them will take the three ill women to Iowa – but the men all refuse or claim they cannot make the trip (which would likely have been true if they were to survive themselves).  So a local woman, a “spinster” in her 30s, declares she will do it. Others doubt she can, but she believes she is as capable as any man to do the job as she lives alone, runs her own farm and has been quite successful up to that time.  The locals prepare a wagon for her, and she sets out to make the journey to the settlements in Iowa.

In the story, the woman is “plain,” and she has been turned down by a local man to whom she’d un-romantically proposed.  His thought was that he could go east and do much better. As she starts out, she encounters and releases a hard-luck never-do-well man from an impromptu lynching - on the condition he do a "job of work" for her.  He reluctantly agrees, and although he threatens not to (after he learns what the job entails), he does complete his part of the bargain in the end.  The remainder of the story concerns their journey, her ultimate collapse, and his partial “redemption” in honoring his commitment to her (and the women). The ill-fated heroine, Mary Bee Cuddy, turns out to have been not strong enough to complete the job, although she is a “very good woman.”  In the end, the scruffy, immoral vagabond she enlists is successful, if only in the task at hand.

This is not a pretty film, it is not uplifting; it is hard to watch.  But the roles are well-acted and in some ways it does depict the realities of life on the Great Plains as they were then (the harshness and the hardship); but not totally. There were two things in this story that do not "work." The first has to do with casting, the other with story. The two are related.

An underpinning premise is that Mary Bee is "plain."  She’s ugly. She purportedly cannot get a husband because of that. This in some degree underlies her failure to complete what she sets out to do, as later events contribute to her own feeling of hopelessness.  But first of all, where are you going to find an established actress who can pull that off?  There are no “ugly” actresses that I can think of; just my opinion.  Hilary Swank plays the role of Mary Bee, and you can “ugly” her up all you want to and she’s still strikingly beautiful.  So that doesn’t work.  That we might overlook; we can pretend she is "plain." 

Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank in "The Homesman"

The second flaw is more damaging to the story’s premise, if you know anything about western history.  Ugly or not, Mary Bee Cuddy is presented to be a successful farmer in the new town of Loup, with good prospects and “money in the bank.”  She is physically strong and healthy - the film begins with a scene of her plowing her own fields. 

Historically, even thirty years later, there was a shortage of marriageable women in the west. There is absolutely no way she would have been left unmarried if that was what she wanted to be.  Men would have courted her from hundreds of miles away the minute they knew she was there – that in fact was the reality on the frontier.  She wouldn’t have had to propose to, or throw herself at, anyone.

In the "old west," marriage-minded men had to marry native women, or camp-followers, if they wanted to find a wife in the west.  In those times, either of those possibilities was considered socially unacceptable; many did so anyway. The Fred Harvey Company hired eastern or mid-western girls to work in the railroad hotels along the transcontinental railroad - they hired young, strong and mostly “pretty” women to host in their restaurants and hotels – but they had to make them sign contracts that they wouldn’t marry for the term of their agreements.  If they hadn’t, those women would have been snapped up as frontier wives before you could blink twice; many of them were anyway, despite those contracts. More than one western ranch wife got her start as a Harvey girl (or an imported school-marm). Other than the Harvey girls, "good" women were scarce in the west for a long period of time. Even a “plain” woman of Mary Bee’s quality would have been a highly-valued prize as a wife.

Still, it is an excellent film. Other than I've noted, it is realistic in terms of action and environment and it is beautifully filmed.  In the end, perhaps the message is that sometimes it takes a bad man to survive, someone not bothered much by conscience. The "good" of a Mary Bee isn't always good enough and that's just the way it is (or was). In this story, her good character interferes with her ability to be successful. We are shown once again that life isn't always fair. Mary Bee Cuddy deserved all good things, but doesn't get them.

I could watch Ms. Swank act all day long. You’ll also find Tommy Lee Jones (also as co-producer/director), John Lithgow, Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld and some other acclaimed actors and familiar faces in this film. I'd call it a stellar cast.  It’s a quality film, believably and competently acted by its great cast.  You won’t laugh, you won’t be entertained (much); but it is a story worth watching and I am sure it is a film I’ll watch again.  I also plan to read the book.