All hail the new feminist Western

Director: Tommy Lee Jones

Screenplay: Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, Wesley A. Oliver

Cast: Hilary Swank, Tommy Lee Jones

Rating: 4/5

Women traditionally play smaller roles in Westerns. They are reduced to rich ladies, pretty widows, or poor prostitutes. They all get kidnapped at some point during the film, who then of course require some sort of rescuing from male characters. The Salvation, which played recently at the BFI London Film Festival, even takes it as far as making the female lead, Eva Green, mute. But there is a big shake-up of tradition in The Homesman, from director Tommy Lee Jones. It tells the story of a woman taking the bold initiative to venture out into the Wild West, transporting three women who have gone insane to a safe place in Iowa.

As a plain jane living in a society where women are defined by how they look, cook, clean, and who they are married to, Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) tries her best to find herself a man, even though her interests lie elsewhere. She is a God-fearing woman of independent means, a rarity in those days, and therefore becomes an instantly memorable character. When tasked with this mission, she enlists the help of a low-life drifter George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), although she does her fair share of the heavy-lifting.

Swank and Jones make a convincing pair of heroes; Swank, the smart, determined, compassionate one, and Jones, the more reluctant, yet ultimately noble one. Swank is hugely effective in a quietly restrained, but meaty role.

Being outside of the societal norm, she wants to appear strong and comfortable with her choices, but in reality the constant reminder of her “inadequacies” as a woman pushes her to do things modern women nowadays would not even dream of doing. As a rare female-led Western, it goes where no other Western has gone before, and Swank is up to the task of portraying a headstrong woman who is nonetheless plagued by insecurities.

Through the female characters of _The Homesman, _the audience gets to see the common hardship and pain the women would have had to live through. The three women showing signs of insanity all have their own stories to tell, some told better than others in flashback sequences, but all of them heartbreaking in equal measure. Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto and Sonja Richter are the young women being transported away from their home, and their blank expressions from which all hope has been drained, highlight the level of suffering they must have endured for years.

It suffers from an excessively episodic format, and struggles initially to weave everyone’s stories together, especially when it comes to editing in the background stories of the three women. But when the trip gets going, everyone faces the harsh realities of surviving in the wild. There are dodgy men who want some female company, whether they consent or not is certainly not their concern, Indians also roam the plains, not to mention the fluctuating temperatures making things extra challenging. Food and water are also common issues, as well as having to keep the three women under control, where good behaviour is not exactly commonplace.

There are both beautiful and tragic events along the way, and it ends on a rather weak note that taps into overwrought sentimentality that the film was so careful to avoid leading up to the finale. Meryl Streep and Hailee Steinfeld make what can only be called cameo appearances, and it is the plot strand that concerns the young Steinfeld that becomes problematic.

However this is a worthy Western to say the least, a rarity, especially in this day and age when it is increasingly rare to have any Western released.