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<\/a><\/p>\nHilary Swank dominates as a self-sufficient and independent unmarried woman in 1850 Nebraska.\u00a0 Pious, prim, hard-working, Mary Bee Cuddy has her own ranch and money in the bank, yet is desperate for a husband.\u00a0\u00a0 Always wanting to do the right thing, the humane and godly thing, Mary Bee offers to take three of the local women east to Iowa.\u00a0 Each has been driven insane, either from marriage, motherhood or loss of a child and their husbands can\u2019t deal with them.\u00a0 A kindly reverend and his wife have offered to get them care and help them get back east to their families, if someone can just bring the women to them.\u00a0 As none of the men in town will help, Mary Bee volunteers.\u00a0 But she can\u2019t do it alone.<\/p>\n
As luck would have it, Mary Bee meets George Briggs – a man literally hanging at the end of his rope – as she finds him still alive in a botched lynching.\u00a0 Somewhat of a scallywag, Briggs is enough of a man to be beholden to the woman who saved his life and agrees to accompany her in transporting her charges to Iowa.\u00a0 Of course, he will also collect $300 on journey\u2019s end.<\/p>\n
Mismatched from the start with each trying to be more defiant, independent and stubborn than the other, much of the journey is silent with little to no conversation.\u00a0 But with nothing but the creaking wagon wheels and whistle of the wind, sooner or later someone has to talk.\u00a0 And as they face the elements, the difficulties of caring for these helpless ill women, the threat of Indians, it seems that Mary Bee and Briggs are not that different and each is on their own journey for redemption or self-discovery.<\/p>\n Tommy Lee Jones is a gifted director with a strength for visual storytelling.\u00a0 There is a lovely lyricism to the lensing as it tells a story in and of itself, serving as a perfect complement to the minimalist styling of the film as a whole, creating a perfect tonal bandwidth. Thanks to some outstanding widescreen lensing in Galisteo, New Mexico (standing in for Nebraska and the plains) and elsewhere with the desert and prairie scenes, we feel how small and insignificant one person is in the face of the world and Mother Nature, while through the performances of Swank and Jones we see how tall one stands with conviction and determination.\u00a0\u00a0 Every scene says something.\u00a0 There is nothing gratuitous in the construct of \u201cThe Homesman.\u201d\u00a0 Jones knows how to tell a story visually – through cinematographic excellence and calculated pacing – as well as with character and story.<\/p>\n Myself well familiar with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s work, I believe Jones made a wise choice selecting him as cinematographer on \u201cThe Homesman\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 Shooting daylight scenes with film and nighttime digitally with the Sony F-55 and then giving filmic texture in post-production so the imagery would match,\u00a0 Prieto creates an elegantly expansive, yet commandingly quiet, visual palette yet gives us an intimate connection with not only the land, but the people.\u00a0 It’s a dichotomous emotional bandwidth that is so difficult and rare, yet Jones and Prieto together do just that.\u00a0 Some of the “Mary Bee lost in the dark on a horse” scenes are breathtaking with inky blues, stark white and real saturation of darkening twilight colors.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A flaming hotel burning to the ground in the dark of night in a completely barren undeveloped stretch of land is hollowing, yet emotionally fulfilling and satisfying.\u00a0 And then the lightness of visual texture as the group reaches the river banks near Iowa (a beautiful Lumpkin, Georgia and Hannahatchee Creek substituting for Iowa) where sunlight softens, greenery abounds and the entire mood lifts and shifts, now being treated with a light touch, a light lens, some soft sunlight, but also more intimate framing.<\/p>\n Jones and Prieto are masterful with the framing.\u00a0 As the journey of Mary Bee and Briggs commences in Nebraska, the horizon is used as the eyeline.\u00a0 Opening with wide shots of the plains, everything revolves around a seemingly still camera with the wagon and our travelers lensed at a distance, at horizon level with blue sky or sunset behind them creating stirring backlit imagery.\u00a0\u00a0 Jones brilliantly uses widescreen as a metaphor.\u00a0 Just watch how wide the shots are as Mary Bee and Briggs embark on their journey, but as the characters connect, as Mary Bee and Briggs become closer, as the three women settle down and become a bit \u201ctamer\u201d, the camera incrementally gets tighter.\u00a0 None of the five are as insignificant as they thought or as many treated them at the outset of the journey.\u00a0 They are not “specks” on the prairie.\u00a0 As the group reaches Iowa (aka Lumpkin, Georgia and the Hannahatchee Creek), framing is softer and more fluid with a hand held sensibility in certain moments.\u00a0 So important to the overall emotion and story, the result is beyond compelling.<\/p>\n Describing his considerations for the emotional journey in terms of his visual palette, Jones notes, \u201c[I]t\u2019s a journey eastward, and the destination looked a lot different than the origin.\u00a0 I got really tired of trying to figure out how we were going to make Galisteo, New Mexico look like bosky woods.\u00a0 We thought of everything and all manner of computer-generated imaging and phony trees and it just didn\u2019t work.\u201d\u00a0 Thanks to some wonderful location scouting, Jones found Lumpkin, Georgia and the living history community of Westville.\u00a0 \u201cWe were very lucky to find Lumpkin, Georgia where some man with a considerable amount of discretionary income tried to buy every 19th century house in Georgia and Alabama, and he brought it and made it a little town and it was perfectly suited to our purposes.\u00a0 We were very, very lucky to find that facility.\u00a0 Because of the contrast between Nebraska and Iowa, we wanted the end of the journey to look and feel a lot different than the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n Attention to detail of story and visuals is also beautifully depicted with a scene in which Mary Bee is singing and craving a return to culture.\u00a0 Described by Jones as \u201ca beautiful scene\u201d, what makes it so powerful is that the camera is on 180 degree dolly track with the camera always moving.\u00a0 \u201cThere is always something happening.\u00a0 As the camera moves, that candle gets behind her head and backlights her hair beautifully.\u201d\u00a0 Using actual lit candles, Jones explains, \u201cIf you\u2019re moving this camera around and suddenly a candle that you see originally here [indicating] winds up being an angelic backlight, it makes a halo.\u00a0 That was the trick I was trying to play.\u00a0 It looks static but it\u2019s always moving.\u00a0 You can\u2019t take your eyes off of her in that singing scene.\u201d<\/p>\n Truly impressive, however, are the characters and the performances.\u00a0 While, as Jones notes, the Swarthout book \u201coffered us a chance to make a screenplay that had some originality to it. . .[and] we are desperately clawing for originality\u201d, he wasn\u2019t afraid to add a bit of self-deprecation to his role, adding some lighter moments with his take on Briggs; a nice balance to some of the deeper thematic commentary throughout the film.\u00a0 A nighttime seduction of Briggs by Mary Bee is as tender and soft as I have ever seen Jones play, while the burning of a new hotel business venture serves almost as a hammering catharsis for Briggs\u2019 unspoken anger at life.<\/p>\n Finding \u201cThe Homesman\u201d to be \u201cnot just a period piece\u201d but a story that \u201creally parallels everyday life for a lot of people\u201d and particularly for women trying to \u201cfind[ing] a man to walk shoulder to shoulder with\u201d, as Mary Bee, Hilary Swank is restrained strength and grit. Swank gives Mary Bee this great practicality and bravura facade, but you can tell she is socially awkward with “less refined folk” and doesn’t quite know how to open up.\u00a0 Describing her as \u201ca woman who has manners and morals and values, and she wants to do the right thing just for the sake of doing the right thing\u201d there are key moments where manners start to falter a bit and Mary Bee starts to clinically open up and talk about her life to Briggs in which Swank adds some great facial nuance that speaks volumes.\u00a0\u00a0 For Swank, \u201cMary Bee goes where angels fear to tread.\u00a0 All these valiant attributes to her, there\u2019s still an underlying need for love.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n