Critics reviews

What makes The Homesman a western of great merit and substance isn't its gorgeous window-dressings or sly subversions in iconography, but the emotional connection it manages to convey through its contemplative treatment of gender, longing and how the two consistently intertwine.

At times The Homesman suggests a John Ford adaptation of Waiting for Godot—the desolation is so extreme that it practically feels absurd. (The film is not without humor, though it's humor of a very dark sort.) ...As the protagonists near their final destination, The Homesman offers a critique of civilization that's almost as pessimistic as its critique of frontier life, suggesting that in every corner of America there have always been more losers than winners.

I was impressed with how Jones's uncomfortable mixing of tones in the first half of the film gave way to something more elegiac and evocative by the end. For much of its running time, The Homesman doesn't quite seem to know where it's going. But once it actually gets there, it attains a hardscrabble nobility.

I was taken with this arid movie, which Jones directs with sugarless confidence. It's Brittle House on the Prairie, a tribute to femininity and its misapprehensions... But then the plot turns and asks something of Mary Bee that is a complete betrayal of Swank's performance and the radiance she emits. The development probably works in Glendon Swarthout's novel of the same name, where Swank is nowhere in sight. But not in the theater.

The Homesman has already been looked upon skeptically for what many see as its cowardly backtracking from the feminist tract implied by much of its running time. But, in addition to introducing a humanistic sense of dimensionality to Briggs's otherwise monotonously sour character, Jones's narrative gambit hints at the ways in which history has often been composed of half-hearted attempts at change that gradually wither back to stagnancy.

Jones' visual style is simple and clean, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto finds some gorgeous John Ford touches; people shown in black silhouette through barn doorways, or house doorways, with the vast bright landscape beyond, a clear demarcation between interior and exterior, displaying the individual against the sheer size of the land out there.

Given this cramped, uneven adaptation, it's impossible for Swank to suggest how close Cuddy comes to an emotional abyss. A climactic, movie-changing event brings the audience up short; as shot and cut, it's not worthy of Cuddy's anguished would-be odyssey. The script undercuts Briggs, too, by deleting the character's perceptive analysis of how a take-charge masculine presence could unhinge a woman as proud and confident as Cuddy.

Integrity and personality can go a long way, especially in a movie as unquestionably flawed as The Homesman. Tommy Lee Jones' off-beat minor-key Western has plenty of virtues, but straightness isn't one of them; at times, it seems like the movie is doing its goshdarnedest to stay crooked, resisting every opportunity to smooth itself out.

Jones is no an eye-popping visual stylist, tending instead towards undressy, matter-of-fact presentation, aided in his subdued approach by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, whose last Western was Brokeback Mountain. Such a laconic perspective serves this Old West atrocity exhibition.

Though The Homesman's title refers to a man, and the film was written and directed by men, it's primarily about women, in ways both fascinating and frustrating. At times, this unconventional Western verges on becoming one of the angriest feminist statements in recent memory... there's a wishy-washiness to the film's ideological bent that keeps steering things in a more conventional direction, as if Jones were afraid to take this risky material all the way.

The first two acts of The Homesman are as ungainly and interesting as its main characters. The film enacts plenty of contradictions: It situates the model of a Strong Female Character alongside three other women who are exploited for suspense and shock value, places convincingly iconoclastic figures in tried-and-true western tropes, and manages to project a consistency of vision despite an erratic tone. All of this strange intrigue falls by the wayside in the final act...

The strength of Cuddy's character (performed with great poise by Swank) and the implications of the women's insanity—through short "memory hits" (Jones's term), the movie portrays the toxic influence of men—initially imbue The Homesman with a bracing feminist agenda. However, a truly shocking, late-breaking event repositions the entire movie; whether it compromises or cruelly asserts the aforementioned feminism is, perhaps to Jones's credit, difficult to tell.