The cruel theology of The Homesman
Spoilers
ahead for a bleak and depressing film.
By Christopher Carson in American
Thinker
Last year, a very well-reviewed but
little known movie was released into theaters. Titled The Homesman
and set in 1855, it refers to a man hired to escort women home “back east” who
had failed to adapt to frontier life in the Nebraska Territory. In this
case, three married women have been driven stark mad by the endless toil and
horrifying privations, physical and mental, of life on the prairie. Each
suffered precipitating events of peculiar horror: one mother lost her three
young children to diphtheria, while another is undone by a loveless marriage,
the death of her elderly mother, and the sheer bleakness of the endless winter
wastes. A third mother commits an unspeakable act and loses her reason as
a result. The women all suffer from what we would today call severe PTSD,
appear dissociated from reality, and are essentially mute.
Into this crisis steps 31-year-old
Mary Bee Cuddy, played by Hilary Swank, a pioneer spinster of extreme
resilience and strength, who volunteers to be the “homesman” who guides the
women home to Iowa, where a kindly pastor’s wife will agree to take them in
until their relatives can properly care for them. Before leaving she
comes across George Briggs (played by Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed the
movie), a down-and-out claim jumper set to be executed for his crime, and she
frees him in exchange for his promise to accompany her (and $300) to Iowa with
the three lunatics in a covered wagon. The irascible Briggs and the pious
Mary Bee Cuddy make an odd couple, of course, as they brave all manner of
danger and sacrifice in their long road to the Missouri River, Iowa, and salvation.
But the film shies away from easy grace and redemption.
Indeed, The Homesman shies
away from grace and redemption, period. The road across the trackless
prairie is well predicted by the wizened George Briggs:
You're gonna meet three kinds of
people out here. You're gonna meet wagon trains that don't want to see crazy
people. You're gonna meet freighters who will surely rape you. And you're gonna
meet Indians who will kill you, and then rape you after they kill me.
But the high-minded Mary Bee, while
genuinely frightened, is not deterred, because her high conscience and
religious certitude compel her to push on with her errand of mercy. She
has to cajole Briggs, who is unimpressed with her efforts:
Mary Bee
Cuddy: If you lied to me, and intend on abandoning your responsibility, then
you are a man of low character, more disgusting pig than honorable man.
George
Briggs: Thank you for the kind words, sister. You're no prize yourself. You're
plain as an old tin pail and you're bossy.
But the film abandons the worn
cinematic tropes in which the unlikely couple is forced by circumstance to
human understanding and even love. There are many human attempts at
redemption by the characters, but every one ends in heartbreak and the death of
hope. The God to whom Mary Bee Cuddy constantly prays aloud is a cruel
god, if he exists at all.
A truly Christian film
is usually intended to show, at least by implication, the theodicy of a
benevolent God who loves His people, hears their prayers, and, despite all
human hardship and sacrifice, demonstrates the possibility of moral
redemption. Mary Bee Cuddy tells Briggs as much by naming one of the
horses “Redemption” and reminding Briggs:
Perhaps you don't realize what a
grand thing you're doing taking these poor, helpless women home. If you don't,
I assure you, I do. This might be the finest, most generous act of your life.
But in the case of The Homesman,
nothing is redeemed, and the result is rather like a horror film, in which no
escape or redemption is possible.
First, and most shockingly, the
virtuous Mary Bee, after being turned down yet again for marriage after
proposing to Briggs himself, realizes she is too old, plain, and “bossy” to
ever be married. In despair, she hangs herself on the journey east.
Briggs is sickened and angry; her suicide causes him to ride off and abandon
the three crazy women. But they follow him, and one falls into the river,
nearly drowning, and Briggs’s conscience pricks him into saving her. The
party comes upon a new hotel, empty except for the staff, which is eagerly
awaiting the arrival of rich investors to show it to. When the smarmy
hotelier callously turns the desperately hungry quartet away, Briggs moves on,
shouting back at them, "Your mothers and your sisters and your wives and
your daughters will curse your broke-dick souls!"
He returns later that night to steal
the food on the table for the women – perhaps a virtuous act under the
circumstances, but he goes overboard and, in a rage, burns the whole hotel down
with its staff. Finally arriving in the Iowa town, he meets the wife of
the pastor, played by Meryl Streep, and turns over his sacred charges to
her.
In town, Briggs initially seems like
a changed man, inspired by the example of the deceased Mary Bee; he buys a
shoeless girl (played by Haile Steinfeld) a new pair and tells her that she
could be told of and fulfill Mary Bee’s legacy:
Tabitha
Hutchinson: Who is Mary Bee Cuddy?
George
Briggs: Mary Bee Cuddy was as fine a woman as ever walked. You'll never know
her.
Tabitha
Hutchinson: Well then, so what?
George
Briggs: Oh. You are the living breathing reason she will never be lost. That's
what I'm talkin'.
Tabitha
Hutchinson: You're a strange man.
George
Briggs: I expect I am. Why don't we marry?
Tabitha
Hutchinson: Maybe.
He also pays for a fine gravestone
cut for his dead heroine and plans on giving her a proper burial. But in
the end, after discovering that his coveted $300.00 is worthless paper printed
from an out-of-business wildcat bank, Briggs himself despairs and gives up the
prospect of a virtuous, settled life with anyone. Penniless, he gets
drunk and boards a keelboat, intending on heading out West again, an atomized
loner separated from society. A passenger kicks the gravestone into the
river, unnoticed and unwanted, as Briggs dances a frenzied jig on the keelboat
deck.
To director Tommy Lee Jones, all
human effort, no matter how nobly undertaken, eventually comes to
nothing. It is either abandoned or found to be unrewarded by a strangely
indifferent god who consents only to the permanency of disease, wild Indians,
vast expanses of nothingness, winter darkness, and the short-lived mercy of
mankind.
Christopher S. Carson writes from
Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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