The Homesman (2014)

A first for me. Never thought a movie could go from a depressing note... to the next depressing note .... and the next , and the next... and... even end on a depressing note.Go go now. Got to do something to cheer me up. Bye

The Homesman starts out with a clear sense of direction, and it maintains that direction for the first hour. Then a strange and unwarranted turn of events throw the movie off track and the last several scenes rob it any integrity or meaning. It gets to where it was supposed to go, minus any climax or resolution. What we are left with is little more than a two hour cue card lesson about some of the Unkindness of the Frontier.The premise involves Swank volunteering to transport three crazed widows across miles of unsettled land to a hospital. She employs Jones as a body guard in exchange for saving him from the noose Though somewhat heavy in mannerism, Hilary Swank gives a strong performance, as does Tommy Lee Jones. Swank is battling some inner emotional turmoil that earns our sympathy, so when the script writes her out in a contrived manner, we are left feeling dumbfounded. Jones is left to finish the job, but the movie fails to showcase his personal investment, or give us a reason why he would bother. There is a creepy and grizzly scene where he resorts to arson in order to steal food for his harem. When he reaches the end of his journey he is welcomed by a curiously cast Merryl Streep playing a relatively flat, five minute role that is far from top billing. There is nothing formally wrong with her performance, its just that her reputation is overwhelms the scene. It would be similar like watching Justin Bieber play at a retirement home. She and Jones have a nice exchange and then the movie ends on a bizarre and emotionally void note that reminds us that all the proceedings have amounted to virtually nothing. It started as one picture and ends as another.

tl;dr: Almost literally ANY Western (or, heck, historical) drama is better than this piece of pretentious, poorly written garbage."Oh, it's so dramatic to see the plight of these Nebraska women!" No it's not. The plots of each character are as contrived as any I've seen in a film. The only difference is that the story is written with utterly abysmal dialogue. None of the characters are likable, if only because the dialogue makes it too difficult to care about any of them (and yes, 1800s-speak is fine. Go watch Gods and Generals or either version of True Grit if you want to listen to 1800s-speak. The problem is that the writer confused "old-timey" with "bad"). The main character, Mary Bee Cuddy (Yes, she is as bland as the name sounds) is supposed to be cut out as a strong, independent woman. Again, no, she is not. Her whole shtick is that she lost her husband and has to do things by herself. She just comes off as bitter and, as the movie put it, "bossy," but neither determined like in True Grit nor somber like one would expect her to be, so it's impossible to connect with her. She tries to sing in the first ten minutes of the movie, with the help of a fake piano. God bless you if you managed to make it past THAT awkward moment. In fact, all the songs are terrible. Yes, there are multiple. At least half a dozen. So, for all practical purposes, the plot (or what little there is of one) is this: women all over Nebraska live terrible lives, and some go insane. It is Cuddy's job to take them to Iowa because WHY THE HECK NOT! So Cuddy throws them all into a paddy wagon and, with the help of a washed-up drunk played by a disinterested Tommy Lee Jones, sets out for Iowa. It actually gets really hilarious seeing her continuously throw loons into the paddy wagon like some bottomless pit (one of whom is Eowyn, by the way. Not that she's important to the story or anything, just that it's more palatable to just imagine Eowyn in the loony bin). Now, to give my fellow reviewers the benefit of the doubt, all the characters sound and act more and more insane as the journey progresses, implying that insanity is infectious. That's not insanity, though. Every character in the movie speaks like that. It's just bad writing. There IS one fight scene in this movie. I won't tell you where. You'll just have to parse through this movie to find it. Mwa. Ha. Ha. Also, the ending is a slap in the face. I cannot go further without going into spoiler territory. The best consolation I can give is this: if you go into the movie expecting physical pain, you will be spared. The movie is too lazy and too bland for THAT kind of torture.

Released in 2014 and directed by Tommy Lee Jones, "The Homesman" stars Hillary Swank as a single pious woman living on the Nebraskan prairie. After saving a drifter from the gallows (Jones) they team-up to escort three mentally ill women to Iowa. Can they survive the journey? The three crazy women are played by Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto and Sonja Richter. James Spader and Meryl Streep have glorified cameos.This is NOT a rousing Western in the least. It's a bleak portrayal of the hard life on the plains during the 1850s, similar in tone to 1972's "Bad Company" and 2015's "The Revenant, but without the latter's breathtaking mountain cinematography.The story's engaging despite the mandatory mundaneness, but it loses points for being so dismal and occasionally nigh shocking (you'll know what I mean), but it's not always downbeat. The movie's acutely realistic, but mixed with an almost surrealistic episode that takes away from the believability, but this can be overlooked on the grounds that what happens is a type of hellish perdition of the arrogant.The theme is the contrast of the primeval West and the civilized East. The West is so harsh that it drives some people mad and they must flee back East for succor. Survival in the West takes everything you have whereas the East is so comfortable that pompous pettiness manifests as a social staple (e.g. the women gossiping in the Iowa town). The Mississippi River (or Missouri River) is the separation point of the two worlds. See below for further commentary.I did find it hard to believe that Mary Bee (Swank) would have a hard time finding a husband. Sure, her face isn't conventionally beautiful, but she has a smoking body (and she ain't even my type).The movie runs 122 minutes and was shot in New Mexico and Lumpkin, Georgia.GRADE: Borderline B/B- (6.5/10 Stars) SUBTEXTUAL INSIGHTS *** SPOILER ALERT *** The ferry boat is a transition from West to East and explains Briggs transition from primitive carnal man to civilized man with a conscience when he crosses over. Notice that he doesn't do the same thing to the gambling house that rejects him that he did to the hotel when he was on the other side.The wooden tombstone he intends to put on Mary Bee's grave as he crosses back to the West is kicked overboard as a symbol that, in returning to the West, he was returning to his old self and would not continue with the idea to make Mary Bee's grave "proper," as she did for a stranger's child.Mary Bee was a strong woman, but she didn't belong in the West because she was too civilized with her strong Christian moral code; and that's why it ultimately killed her.