There is an unforgettable moment in The Homesman when a pale woman living in a modest south-western style house during the 1800s takes what appears to be the corpse of a baby and walks it over to an outhouse. The camera tracks her in a single take.
Before arriving at the wooden shack, we hear the shrieking cry of the newborn — a cue that the baby is still alive. The woman throws the baby into the outhouse like some refuse and shuts the door. I was confused, lacking sufficient time to process the proceedings, and the shot then quickly cut to another character in a different part of the story.
What happens before this sequence has very little do with what happens within it, and what follows it feels unfitting, but for the brief moments when it lingered on screen, I nearly vomited in shock. I’m still affected by the power of the image.
This brief scene from the two-hour western encapsulates for the viewer the dominant idea of the film: the lavishing and the frustrating. This is a feminist western that follows Mary Bee Cuddy (the mother) as she journeys with a convict man to transport three mentally insane women across the country. The happenings on this journey are episodic encounters with different unrelated ideas.
The film concerns the living conditions of women in the 1800s. When women are not cared for, it is difficult for them to care for their children, and thus an inescapable cycle occurs where society becomes trapped in haunting psychosis. The first two acts of The Homesman depict this madness, as there is not a sane character shown. The only difference between each of them is that some are better at hiding their insanity than others.
The aforementioned young mother is alone, sick, and disturbed. Clearly, something has made her neurotic, but we remain unaware of the cause. For a film that attempts to depict the living conditions of women in the old west, all of the female characters remain cyphers and their problems take centre stage, overshadowing any depiction of depth in their character. They are one-dimensional, nothing more than their mental illnesses, which seems to undermine the entire point of the movie.
Most annoying are the wild tangents that comment on the class divide seen in the riches of the east and the poverty of the west. The film touches on the greed of the upper class, while indulging in common western tropes, such as threatening Native Americans. Consequently, it becomes a wildly uneven picture with fragments of ideas that hide the main theme.
The Homesman seems to wander in a desert of ideas and, in the end, you lose track of what the entire journey was supposed to be about.
On a plot level, the film is most certainly never boring, but from a thematic standpoint, the concerns developed in the scene where the mother kills her newborn child come across merely as violent imagery used to intrigue the viewer, but do not contribute to anything wholly satisfying.
