The Homesman -- Anyone else watch this movie?

Cafe Society
1

Apparently it’s based on a book. It stars Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank, with appearances by Jon Lithgow, Meryl Streep, and James Spader.

It feels like they may have taken an interesting story from the book (Three women/wives in a town in the Nebraska Territories in 1850 have gone insane and need to be taken back east for treatment, and Swank is chosen to do it, accompanied by TLJ), but they beat the ever-loving shit out of it with the boring stick until they were able to stretch it to 2 hours.

It does violate one of my general rules about cinema: Don’t see a movie directed by one of its leads (TLJ directs this stinker). But even then…if it follows the basic premise of the book this movie was destined to be a rotter from the get-go, from its depressing way the crazy women are treated, to the depressing life of Swank’s character, to the ending that leaves you depressed even more.

So my review is: If you were thinking of watching this movie (it recently came up on Amazon Prime, I think), just go ahead and skip it.

2

I watched it so you don’t have to. Everything CrazyJoe said.

3

Well it got a 6.6 rating on IMDB:

And 81% of Rotten Tomato reviewers liked it:

But I haven’t seen it and judging from the description it doesn’t sound like a movie I would want to watch.

4

It is the way of modern entertainment - take 60 minutes worth of story and turn it into many hours of product.

5

Or, take a 90 minute movie and stretch it over eight episodes of a series.

6

Yeah, I am flabbergasted at this. My wife, who was an English major and much better at interpreting and appreciating the art of the written (and scripted) word, also thought it was not great. I have to imagine most of the folks rating this movie were people who read the book and therefore translated some of the unspoken (but not unwritten) emotion and motivation to what they saw on the screen.

Spoilers below:
Some reviews online have rightly pointed out that:

  • A woman of that era who owned land and knew how to farm it would not be considered unmarriable. Whatever her temperament and looks (and it was laughable to call Swank “plain” as was done repeatedly, but we’ll overlook that), she would have been courted regularly simply because of her status as a landowner, even in the Nebraska Territories.
  • She was a profoundly Christian woman who had sworn an oath to escort these women and had shown nothing but determination. For her to abandon them and commit suicide was way out of character especially with no real explanation/exposition.
  • This was marketed as a sort of “feminist” western but the treatment of the women (realistic or not) especially with so little backstory argues against it.

I just… I don’t know how it can be rated as high as it is, unless it’s bias from reading the book or from people reading a lot more into it than I was able to.