Director, star and co-writer Tommy Lee Jones’s earthy adaptation of Glendon Swarthout’s novel has been hailed in some quarters as a groundbreaking “feminist western”. In concentrating primarily on the trials and fortitudes of Hilary Swank’s Mary Bee Cuddy, it certainly overturns some of the genre’s macho stereotypes – initially at least.
When three variously traumatised women require transportation from Nebraska to Iowa in the unforgiving 1850s, it falls to Mary Bee to escort them to safety, an act of both altruism and self-determination. Heading east, she encounters dangling wretch George Briggs (Jones), whose gruffly reluctant help she duly enlists.
Habitually rebuffed for being “as plain as an old tin pail”, Mary Bee is in need of a man and the irascible Briggs seems to her as good a choice as any (“we make a good team”), despite his growling wounded-bear hostility.
Imposingly shot by Rodrigo Prieto, this chilly tale of 19th-century endurance has true grit under its fingernails and the dirt of the midwest on its boot-heels, the craggy landscape of Jones’s fiercely bewhiskered saddlebag face melding with the harsh beauty of the American terrain. As with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Jones’s direction has an Eastwood-esque confidence and simplicity that gets the best from his cast.
Swank is outstanding as Mary Bee, the tough former teacher making her way in a man’s world, flintily determined to build a family home despite constant rejection by men, none of whom is her equal. A shame, then, that the narrative should contrive to lynch her independence, the film refocusing on the altogether less interesting Briggs after a firelight scene of hoary “have your cake and eat it” misjudgment.
The result is infuriatingly conflicted fare, buoyed up by brilliant performances, weighed down by old-school cliche, leavened by the bleak plains over which it casts its lonely, misanthropic eye.
