It has been nine years since Tommy Lee Jones made his directing debut with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. That acclaimed Western, which won multiple awards at the Cannes Film Festival, was occasionally confused but had a distinctive energy and life, with its blend of lyrical visuals, dark comedy, and grotesque characters. Now Jones’ second film as a director, The Homesman, comes to Tarrant County theaters this week, and it’s unfortunately clear that whatever made Three Burials a success, whether it was the contemporary Texas setting, superior material, beginner’s luck, or something else, it has deserted Jones here.
Adapted from a 1988 novel by Glendon Swarthout, the story is set in the 1850s in a community in the Nebraska Territory, where three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter) have gone insane from the hardships and loneliness on the windswept prairie where their husbands have been trying to scratch out a living. A tough-talking spinster from New York named Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) draws the short straw — literally — to take on the dangerous job of transporting the women across the Missouri River to a church in Iowa that cares for the mentally ill. Shortly after setting out in a horse-drawn wagon, she encounters low-life claim jumper George Briggs (Jones) and saves him from being hanged by the townsfolk. In exchange, she enlists him to help her on the journey.
Promoting his film, Jones has been talking it up as a feminist tale. Indeed, even though George is brought along as male protection against the hazards of the long trip, he’s an unreliable drunk who frequently cuts a buffoonish figure. This is especially true in his undignified brawl on the plains with a rogue trader (Tim Blake Nelson) who tries to take one of the madwomen as his property. However, the feminist flag is effectively burned by a bizarre plot development about two-thirds of the way through regarding the hard-headed Mary. There’s so little preparation for this in the performances, the direction, or the writing that if you’re not familiar with the novel, you’ll be left scratching your head at the movie’s tragic turn.
However, if you are familiar with the book, then you know that Swarthout’s novel works better as a study of solitude in the sparsely populated West and of its corrosive effects on the psyche. Jones gives no sign of recognizing this, and even if he did, that’s not where his strengths lie as a filmmaker. He’s a director who thrives on social interactions, awkward though they might be, as he showed in Three Burials. Alas, here his adaptation (co-written by Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley A. Oliver) lets him down. The aforementioned brawl is done pretty much right, but George’s encounter with an unaccommodating luxury hotel proprietor (James Spader with a ridiculous Irish accent) misses the note of comedy that the director is aiming for. Jones stuffs the movie with big names — John Lithgow as Mary’s preacher, Hailee Steinfeld as a barefoot hotel servant, Gummer’s real-life mother Meryl Streep as the Iowa preacher’s wife who takes the women in — but they’re not given a chance to even make much of an impression, let alone affect the story.
The Texas-born, Harvard-educated Jones does still show flashes of talent as a filmmaker, and if he weren’t in such demand as an actor, maybe he’d be better able to hone his directorial craft. (Then again, would we want to give up his entertaining turn in Lincoln, his terrific work in Hope Springs, or his leading role in No Country for Old Men?) Had The Homesman come out in, say, 2007, I’d say that he was on a learning curve, but with so long a silence between projects, he doesn’t really have the time for that. All I know is, this movie is a failure of such dimensions that it’s hard to even tell what the filmmaker is driving at.
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The Homesman
Starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones. Written by Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, and Wesley A. Oliver, based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel. Rated R.
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