Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter, Jo Harvey Allen, Barry Corbin, David Dencik, William Fichtner, Evan Jones, Caroline Lagerfelt, John Lithgow, Tim Blake Nelson, Jesse Plemons, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Meryl Streep.

Some films just have the ability to leave an audience member completely unnerved by the message of stark truth that they can feel as though have been hit several times with a jack hammer across the stomach and yet have them pleading for more.

Whereas a lot of period dramas will have the sense to sugar coat some of the reality or change it in some way that the sheer desperation of the situation doesn’t affect the way the audience depicts the lives of those who have passed into the swirling dustballs of time, The Homesman is a film which leaves you with no other choice but to take in social history and feel shame for the way as a species we allow one another to feel abandoned.

The films sees a middle aged spinster taking on the job of transporting three women who have succumb to madness in way or another back to Iowa where they can receive help and care in a society and setting that was pre-dominated by the type of man who wouldn’t have understood the pressure that they were placed under.

The Homesman is unrepentant in its bleak, desolate outlook, its stark depiction of the way of life that pioneering farmers and settlers had but also in the way that women were nothing more than a commodity or a machine in which to breed to start the foundations of new towns and personal empires. The taste of dust and decay is ever present as the foundation stones of solitude and extreme isolation are forever being built upon. Just sitting in the cinema, surrounded by the bleakness of the situation facing the three women and the slow unravelling of the journey ahead for Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank, George Briggs and Mary Bee Cuddy is enough to have an audience member feel their flesh crawl with sympathy and consideration for what those people went through.

There will undoubtedly be detractors for the film’s suggestion that there is no real strength to found ultimately in any of the female characters but this is a film based on being harsh and in the case of The Homesman very harsh, reality of what solitude and continuing isolation meant in those far off days. This was a set of people cut off even from each other, who might have to ride for several hours just to see another soul. There was a community but it was built upon a different set of traditions, one in which there was no room for sentiment or the need for interaction. Whereas a man might thrive under such conditions, the way that a woman is a creature of social interaction and companionship, even with the friendship of other women, is paramount.

This is especially true for Hilary Swank’s character of Mary Bee Cuddy. A woman who is strong enough to survive initially but who, with time, realises that to be on her own is a fate that is too unspeakable to bear. It is this graphic nature that makes The Homesman a film of absolute quality and both Tommy Lee Jones as Director and screenplay writer, alongside Kieran Fitzgerald and Wesley Oliver, and Ms. Swank as giving perhaps the most brutal portrayal of her career so far are fully deserving of all the praise.

Whether the audience member ultimately decides to believe that the film is a new type of Western, one solid enough to grasp that the old way of carrying forward the genre was one of cliché ridden sentiment, or a period drama in which most cinema audiences would struggle to associate with is open for debate but The Homesman certainly has the weight of responsibility upon its shoulders in which attitudes of certain times in American history are white-washed from its conscious. America was built upon such times and should never be forgotten.

Ian D. Hall