This movie sucks too. Sure, it’s not as brazenly offensive (to me and my sensibilities) as “Above the Lights” but it is a film that starts off with the novel idea of doing a feminist Western and then betrays that premise completely by the time the credits roll.
What Works: It starts out as a movie centered on Hilary Swank’s tough homesteader in the unforgivingly harsh Nebraska territory—stay out of the Mid-West, good advice then and hasn’t aged much since—who volunteers to transport three local women who’ve gone crazy to a church in Iowa. And Swank is absolutely the best thing in the movie. It shocked me that characters kept saying she’s “plain” or unattractive, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of her open, trustworthy features. The contrast between that and the three women who’ve been diagnosed with “Prairie Fever” is sharp, and a movie centered solely on any of these women trying to undermine our heroine’s mental stability would have been something special. Sadly, by the time The Homesman even acknowledges that Swank is having doubts, it’s in one of the most out-of-left-field plot twists in recent memory…
What Doesn’t: …Tommy Lee Jones’ character really takes the movie into a different direction and pushes Swank to the background. This is in no way a good thing. He shoves the psychological battle between Swank and the women and the questions of how sane is anyone to be a pioneer aside, and really derails what little the movie had going for it. It becomes more about saving his character and how capable he is than anything to do with Swank. Then, not long after the bizarre plot twist is a scene of wildly disproportionate revenge. It makes a character we thought we knew look damn-close to a total psychopath (worse? it feels like it was added just because the film needed a burst of action), but then quickly goes back to showing that character as genial. I like it when a movie is willing to go strange, but this just feels stupid.
Also, at one point Tommy Lee Jones the director/writer of this film really snaps credulity like a rubber band by having Swank’s character throw herself at him and him being totally disinterested initially. It’s around this time that the film really feels more like wish fulfillment for Jones than anything it started off being.
What I Would Have Done Differently: The three women who lose their minds are really more of a plot device, and aren’t fully fleshed out enough. I would have had at least one of the women (probably the German one, who’s also the most vicious) be lucid enough to play mind games with Swank, maybe even taunting her sexually since it’s made clear Swank is so undesirable. Imagine a psychological duel between two frontier women that gets at just how crazy you have to be to try to build something of your own in a harsh but new place. Now that would be a film you haven’t seen before, but, unlike here, it would also be one worth seeing.