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Posted: |
Dec 30, 2014 - 5:32 PM
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By: |
joan hue
(Member)
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Jon, I thought your review was very good. I do think one has to hear this music in the context of this VERY strange movie. I'm glad Jones let Beltrami be thematic with his "Mary Bee" theme, which I found varied and very lovely. Other cuts are alien sounds and harsh just like the overall geography of the settings and the personal lives of the main characters.
I doubt this will be a popular movie. It is just plain strange and weird and yet haunting. It has interesting ruminations on feminism or the roles of women, on personal strength and the fragility of heroics and strengths, on the need to be eccentric yet normal, and on the fragile threads of sanity. I think it explores other themes too all couched in a kind of existentialist narrative.
I didn't think the ending worked all that well, and I didn't care for the "big stars" showing up for a few minutes as they pulled me from the realism of this movie. (IMHO) Still, as I said it is haunting and beautifully scored, and leaves the audience pondering many issues. Also, it is just weird enough to turn off some audience members. I hope someday we'll have a discussion thread on this movie so I can read various points of view and interpretations.
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As always, I enjoy a post by joan. You always have a thoughtful response to films.
I share a few of your reactions to the film. The parade of stars worked a little against the strength of its disappointment. Having said that, this is the film I seem to have thought more about in its aftermath than the other 20 or so I've seen in the last few weeks. And that final image, of a man on a boat, drunk and revelling, drinking into darkness... haunting.
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The last scene seemed to me to be saying that sadly, character-change won't happen here.
Many films offer us characters who go through some kind of transformation by the end. Jones' character would be transformed by his frisson with his Katharine Hepburn-style foil in the lightest version of this -- he'd teach her a thing or two, she'd teach him a thing or two, and they'd be together in the end. Cuddy's death rules out that path abruptly -- it caught me completely off guard. I started to think - 'ah, her legacy is going to be he will become a better man'. But not so. A few kind acts (ultimately just earning his money) do not make him a better man. He will collapse again into the slump where we found him, but worse. Drunken oblivion, merriment, and the name he wants that girl to remember will be forgotten (already her gravestone is lost).
The gravestone thing got me thinking for a while. I figured the film was being more symbolic there. It's not a hint of what happens next on that boat, more that the memory we (and apparently he) want to be preserved will be forgotten quicker than we could have imagined. And that is the real tragedy.
If you want to go a bit further - and I don't think the film was necessarily doing this by intention - consider some of the possible allusions. Are we seeing the rest of Jones' life represented in that scene? He will do this for decades as he drifts across the river Styx. He will forget her, or perhaps even he will go to a place where the memory of her does not belong (perhaps even hell?).
What makes it a more ambiguous scene is that we don't have a character revelation to experience this through. (Normally films use empathy with a character's learning as a way to tell us what they're trying to say.) Our point of view is separate to anyone else's in the scene. (Truly perhaps this is what is meant by 'letting the audience discover something for themselves', although the risk is that discovery is less assured.)
I didn't say much about it here, but there's a couple of thoughts on the film:
http://daisychainrearranged.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/and-everything-nice-part-three.html
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Posted: |
Dec 31, 2014 - 6:59 PM
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By: |
joan hue
(Member)
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Wow franz, we do think alike on the ending. I just wanted someone to articulate my various feelings on the end, and you do so. (Love your blog too.) Really good insight into his character and into allusions.
SPOILERS ahead….spoilers if you have not seen the movie.
I think there were hints here and there that foretold the possibility of that “surprise” death. (But I was still surprised.) There were a few fleeting rather portentous scenes. For all of her abilities and strengths, now and then we would see a fissure in her strengths. The hardships of the journey, not finding the bon fire for a day and having him, an old grizzled man, turn down her pragmatic offer (the second offer), I think dissolved her ability to go on. She’s like a man with her roping, shooting, etc., yet she is still ingrained in the need for the traditional female role of wife and mother. She was strong to take the journey, and the journey broke her.
Yep, Jones was no Humphrey Bogart from the African Queen. He was not redeemed, but we sort of were lead to think he would be. He fought for food at the hotel. When the women followed him, we had that amazing scene of him and three women in the river. I thought then he had found a moral center. He also told the young girl that Mary was the finest woman he knew, and he paid for the headstone. Those were hints at redemption, but I guess you can’t really change, “the spots on a leopard.” He didn’t even notice the loss of the headstone, and so his authentic self reemerged. I think that was very tragic and very hard on the audience. We tend to prefer the Humphrey Bogart migration into a “do the right thing” universe, and Briggs didn't deliver that to us.
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I should have posted a spoiler warning for my own post too. Oops. SPOILER HERE TOO.
We're pretty much in-sync on this one.  I agree that the reasons for Cuddy's suicide are apparent after the fact. She was definitely in a place of emotional desperation beforehand. I just don't know that I thought the film would go there before it did.
Someone once told me they liked Bergman's films because you could sense by the end, the thing that the characters were missing. A sense of charity, an ability to forgive, humility, whatever. These qualities were absent in a way that the characters were not aware of, and yet it affected everything they did. We come to value the absent things because we know about them -- a sort of 'there but for the grace of God go we.' The ending of The Homesman - if it does work, is probably working this way. We don't get that little catharsis of seeing someone find our values on screen.
By the way, if you want to see another interesting post-western, one that is less heavy-going but also very alert to the position of women in that world, I can recommend MEEK'S CUTOFF. There's no score to speak of, but there's a truly immersive sense of time and place about it.
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Posted: |
Mar 20, 2015 - 6:56 AM
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By: |
DeputyRiley
(Member)
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Deputy, after you see The Homesman, go up in the topic and see the discussion Franz and I had about the movie. It is a very "different" kind of western. Hopefully you'll post your thoughts.
I knew it would be different, just as TLJ's 3 Burials was a very different kind of western. It almost couldn't be called a western, 3 Burials. In an interview TLJ doesn't even like to call The Homesman a western, even though yes, it does have, as TLJ says, "big hats and horses."
Anyway, I will check out the conversation you mentioned and post my thoughts. Honestly I thought 3 Burials, while ambitious, ballsy, and unique, was ultimately not a good movie. Very dull, too strange, and I did not connect. I'm hoping Homesman will be different, even though I've come to understand it does retain a certain strangeness.
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more praise for THE DROP! Loved it and the Lehane novel.
As for THE HOMESMAN....honestly, fuck. Was floored by it in such a deep and depressing way. Without giving away too much, I will go and say it joins MONSTER and WINTER'S BONE as films that are of great quality but struck such a depressing nerve with me that once viewing was enough. It was never SOLD as a feel good film or anything of the like, I was ready for it to be a drama but my goodness, how bleak.
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