The Homesman (2014)
Directed by Tommy Lee Jones
When three women living on the edge of the American frontier are driven mad by harsh pioneer life, the task of saving them falls to the pious, independent-minded Mary Bee Cuddy. Transporting the women by covered wagon to Iowa, she soon realizes just how daunting the journey will be, and employs a low-life drifter, George Briggs, to join her. The unlikely pair and the three women head east, where a waiting minister and his wife have offered to take the women in. But the group first must traverse the harsh Nebraska Territories marked by stark beauty, psychological peril and constant threat.
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The strangest section of the film involves a stop-over at the Fairfield Hotel, standing alone in the middle of the plains, like an Andrew Wyeth painting, reminiscent of Sam Shepard's house in Terrence Malick's " Days of Heaven ."
Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto ("Brokeback Mountain") enhances the vastness of the landscape which Jones has taken pains to shift as the journey progresses.
(The cinematographer is Rodrigo Prieto , who has brought his mastery to "Brokeback Mountain," "Babel" and "The Wolf of Wall Street," among other projects.)
As the sweeping landscapes, gorgeously photographed by Rodrigo Prieto of Brokeback Mountain, Argo, and The Wolf of Wall Street, host the unlikely quintet of travelers, Jones allows the audience to marinate in an undercurrent of Cuddy’s assured steadfastness and even insecurities, gladly stepping back to let Swank shine.
Working in gritty 35-millimeter with the gifted cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto ( 25th Hour , Brokeback Mountain ), Jones devotes most of the frame to the sky whenever he presents landscapes, making any human activity seem trivial.
Veteran cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto , with an Oscar nod for capturing the interplay between man and the environment so beautifully in "Brokeback Mountain," does the shooting.
Tommy Lee Jones’ second theatrical feature, “The Homesman,” is curt, cruel and weirdly funny, a female-leaning 1855-set Western “road movie” about a covered-wagon escape-cum-trek from pioneer life in the Nebraska Territories that lives up to Jones’ advance talk of the film as being built by himself and ingenious cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Babel,” “The Wolf of Wall Street”) upon geometry, minimalism and the visual work of artists like Donald Judd and Josef Albers, Kabuki theater and the textures of photographer Josef Koudelka.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominik
Visuals Themes
The Homesman, adapted from a novel by proven western hand Glendon Swarthout (The Shootist, 7th Cavalry), fits securely into the "new wave" of ultra-realistic (read: surly and grubby) oaters, à la the Coen Brothers' True Grit and No Country for Old Men; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; Meek's Cutoff, etc.
From Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch and Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller through Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Jarmusch’s Dead Man to Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, the outlier/atypical exception has become the norm, and these days, the truly daring move would be to make a straight-up oater without the frills.
Working in a succession of lowly jobs, Senegalese immigrant Samba (Omar Sy, the co-lead from The Intouchables) strives to keep his head above water while fighting to gain residency in France.