Deborah Ross

Just because The Homesman has a few women in it doesn’t make it a ‘feminist western’

But the film’s major problem is that it goes all John Wayne on us midway through

issue 22 November 2014

The Homesman, which stars Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and is set in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s, is being sold as ‘a feminist Western’, which is a bit rich. This is not a bad film. It’s modestly entertaining, in its way. And it does portray the harshness of life for the early women settlers.

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