After seeing the preview for The Homesman, I was very excited to see it. The Homesman stars Hillary Swank as Cuddy, a single woman of property out West who decides to embark on a charitable mission to bring three mentally disabled women to a place that can care for them. She enlists Tommy Lee Jones, who also directs The Homesman, to help her in exchange for saving his life. The Homesman is set in the nineteenth century and is an adaptation of a novel that I have no desire to read.
I was excited to see The Homesman because Cuddy is my kind of woman: independent, economically wise, plain talking, bossy, brave and kind. My only issue with The Homesman was the disappointing turn that the story took after 1 hour and 20 minutes.
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Sure there were signs that Cuddy had some cracks in her soul. She pretended to play the piano and was going mad without music, but you are telling me that she decides that her last act on Earth was to sleep with Tommy Lee Jones’ character, whom one should not confuse with the real life talented thespian, director and scholar, then off herself! No! I get that she wanted to get married and have someone share the daily literal and psychological burden of a rough life out West, but did not have the option of just sending away for a husband like her male counterparts could when they wanted a wife, but really!?!
I am choosing to take this personally. I am a 41-year old Christian single woman who is personally conservative, and yes, I have the good fortune to live in a time and place where that is not as unusual as in the nineteenth century, but I still have plenty of spoken and unspoken stigma directed at me because of the way that I choose to live my life-unmarried, uncoupled and childless. I would rather be alone than wish that I was alone. By treating Cuddy like that, you made all that judgment real: a bitch without a man is crazy and missing something. I am not giving it up to some old, loser drunk who would betray me for money and call me bossy.
If I somehow lost my ever-loving mind due to Mother Nature upping my hormones and leaving me only with the animal instinct to mate and reproduce by any means necessary and was so thirsty that Jones’ character was an acceptable option, my last act on Earth would still be to make damn sure that those women got to their destination safely before I died of horror. Cuddy would own her shit and still do the right thing for those women first! I don’t care if it is faithful to the book. The author betrayed her character and did not know her.
I thought The Homesman was Cuddy’s movie, but it really is Jones’ movie, which should not have surprised me since he is the titular character. If you were a woman out West, you were going to go mad and die. When he confronts another image of himself, selfish and thoughtless inhospitable men led by the magnificent bastard James Spader, he decides to destroy that image of himself (next time, pack more food). As he goes eastward, he has an opportunity for redemption by doing something right and being seen as someone who does something right. As he returns to the West without money, his real nature kicks in, and he returns to the oblivion of drunken revelry and forgets about his resolutions to live a better life and honor Cuddy’s memory. The Homesman is a tragedy about how no matter where you go, you will still be there. You can’t escape yourself.
The Homesman is not without flaws. For instance, I could not initially tell when something was a flashback or not. I did appreciate that The Homesman visually was unflinching. The marital rape scene was difficult to watch and left me with a lot of questions. Were they ever a normal couple when they first got together and shared a bed or did she just think that was how life is? When Cuddy’s suitor left to get a wife, all these women were going mad. When are you guys going to learn and stop importing people unsuited to the rigors of life in the West? Cuddy was a catch, but that aspect of The Homesman was realistic.
Reviewers have classified The Homesman as a feminist Western. The Homesman may be sympathetic to women and merciless in its depiction of society as an inhospitable place for them, but not all women succumb to madness and become outcasts in society. Some women find another way to write their own stories apart from their relationship to others. The Homesman trucks in deceptive advertising and is really another story about a man briefly civilized by women even if that wasn’t their intent.