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Especially after the pointless suicide of Swank's character -- surprising, yes... But not in any way that challenges or interests the audience or illuminates the characters or the narrative. Likewise with the increasingly random motivations of Jones' character, especially the mass killing he perpetrates in the name of acquiring food for his charges, when it would have been just as easy for him to steal that roasted pig and melt off into the darkness with no harm to anyone (even the douchebags he killed, who deserved to get whupped, perhaps, but not the fiery end that came to them). There's just no sense of justice or morality in this fictional world. And I'm not talking about any kind of religious or absolute judgement. I'm talking about just getting a enough of a sense of where the characters come from, of what they value, to care about them and want to follow their journey. If Jones is a cipher and Swank a kind of martyr, almost everyone else -- including the central plot device, the three crazy women in need of a ride back to the apparently saner East -- is a cartoon.

I'm not usually one to jump into reading films through a gendered or political lens, but it's hard not to in this case. The source novel and the adapted screenplay seem to demand it. Here's a story set in the background of what first appears to be a minor outbreak of frontier madness a la Wisconsin Death Trip. But what turns out to be much closer to frontier female trouble/hysteria, as the film repeatedly suggests that these "crazy" women haven't so much been driven mad by the harsh conditions of an unforgiving prarrie winter, but by the mindless abuse of their husbands and almost total disempowerment of their position as homesteader wives and mothers. The unmarried heroine of the film -- strong, smart, artistic, independent -- spends lots of her screen time begging to be subjected to exactly this kind of nightmare bondage with two men who are clearly her lessers and for whom she feels no love (both of whom reject her as "too bossy" for asserting herself at all). Then she bullies Jones into pityfucking her and hangs herself when it's clear that he won't agree to marriage.

Seriously, what the fuck? This isn't about dramatic irony or some kind of unvarnished realism. It's just confused and crappy storytelling, just diddling around with big themes that are far more powerful than it has the skills to think through coherently. If True Grit is one of the greatest Westerns of all time (both the book and the 2010 film) and if the book and the Coen brothers' film is also one of the great feminist Westerns, then this is like the anti-True Grit in nearly every respect. Rooster Cogburn has had farts that are more compelling than Jones' ne'er-do-well. And we're meant to think of Swank as an older variation on Mattie Ross, which Jones signals explicitly by wasting Hailee Steinfeld in a pointless cameo late in his own film. As it drags on and on, long after it should end, the film stumbles toward a bloated final moment that imagines itself to be some kind of folk poetry -- Twain by way of Peckinpah --but instead just kind of makes you feel bad for Jones playing the fool as if it means anything at all. (And that's more or less a metaphor for Jones' relationship to the whole production -- he's clearly put his all into this and built it up in his mind into something far more profound than we're seeing.) Anyway, the ill-timed theater lights rose automatically while the last few seconds of this ending played out, but it didn't seem to affect the audience much one way or another. We all just shuffled out with a collective shrug.

Yes, she's a surprisingly independent and strong woman... But she still a woman, a pioneer woman. The whole purpose of the homestead is just that: to build a home. She's also hardly some wild mountain woman. If she is cultured, it is only because she is from the East, and she still clearly pines for the domesticity which she left behind. The juxtaposition of the opening scenes make this clear: Swank out in the field doing harsh unforgiving farm work as well as any man (better perhaps given Jones later story). Then her standing in front of a mirror, trying to call forth some beauty in a landscape that has absolutely no need for it. Even before her rejection, even before her mock-piano playing, all the ingredients are there for a nervous breakdown.

To me, the rejection of her as "plain" as nothing to do with her looks. This isn't only because of the Betsy Blair casting of an attractive woman as a "dog". I think the double-meaning is clear: it's her very self-sufficiency, her "uncommon life" that marks her as unmarriable. It's why the men may be shamed, but they leave her to the journey just the same: in the fabric of the community, an old spinster is expendable. It's all too easy for us to respond to such sentiments with "fuck 'em", but it's clearly a double-edged burden to Swank's character.

Also, while the film is clearly playing with radical and feminist material, it's far too simplistic to boil the film down as anti-domesticity. Only the Svenson husband is shown as truly abusive. Jesse Plemons is portrayed as a doting husband, albeit one that simply cannot understand his wife's madness. And while William Fichtner's character's character is called into question, there's no evidence of him being abusive to his family. Rather it is the starvation conditions of their farm that drives the Sours woman to infanticide. The common denominator isn't simply married-life but the conditions, brutal and unforgiving, of pioneer life. The conflict of trying to put a square peg (domesticity) into a round hole (wilderness). One could extricate a feminist reading from this, but it hardly provides the limit.

It occurs to me now that what separates Cuddy from the rest of the women isn't just independence of spirit, but also independence of means. She clearly has a certain amount of economic privilege that the others don't. As such her narrative arc within this "road film" is coming face-to-face with the very harsh conditions of life that the other women have had to live with every single day. It's no coincidence that the pivotal scene for her is one in which she too experiences the same freezing, starvation condition that broke the other women. Everything from this point forward fall is a logical progression to madness. We return to the earlier piano playing and in this new context it strikes us as symptomatic of neurosis. That she falls into the arms of someone who had potentially left for dead to me only underlies, not undermines, a feminist reading. Faced with the senseless harshness of frontier life she grasps, desperation disguised as pragmatism, for meaning. And as a woman, in that period, rightly or wrongly, the only meaning she can create is that of family, marriage. When that fails, so does she.

1) There's no way around it, it is mass murder, it is excessive. Even the arguments in favor of Gibb's actions – that by sending them away, the hotel was essentially sentencing them to death; that if he simply stole the food, it was filled with skilled gunmen who could easily hunt him and the women down – doesn't mitigate the barbarity of the act. You're right. Morality and justice doesn't figure into it. It's something that Gibb's felt needed to be done, so he did it. It is an amoral act, point blank, as amoral and senseless as the landscape surrounding them. It's not good or moral, it just is. However, I have no doubt that Jones meant it to be as divisive and incongruent a scene as it reads. I might not know what to think of the scene, but I have no doubt that it's worth thinking over.

Cold Bishop wrote:As such her narrative arc within this "road film" is coming face-to-face with the very harsh conditions of life that the other women have had to live with every single day. It's no coincidence that the pivotal scene for her is one in which she too experiences the same freezing, starvation condition that broke the other women. Everything from this point forward fall is a logical progression to madness. We return to the earlier piano playing and in this new context it strikes us as symptomatic of neurosis. That she falls into the arms of someone who had potentially left for dead to me only underlies, not undermines, a feminist reading. Faced with the senseless harshness of frontier life she grasps, desperation disguised as pragmatism, for meaning. And as a woman, in that period, rightly or wrongly, the only meaning she can create is that of family, marriage. When that fails, so does she. Expecting her to be Andrea Dworkin with a six-shooter strikes me as wholly unreasonable. Even a strong woman can succumb to loneliness or the weight of societal expectations.

So you view her suicide as a simple descent into madness, just like the other women only longer in coming? There's no way that Cuddy, this particular character, could or should have kept it together to fulfill the responsibility she'd committed to, to deliver these women safely back to the city? There's nothing that rings dramatically false about that? I still don't see the point of telling this version of her story. It doesn't feel tragic or true -- shocking, maybe, but not in any way that lands. And I definitely was never tempted to retroactively diagnose Cuddy, either. There's no way that the character we knew up till that fateful moment would have done what she did. It'll take a much more convincing case for me to believe this is anything other than bad writing.

My only disappointment was that James Spader as an Irish hotelier could have had so much more legs.

Swank's character dies and the film never recovers from that. Tommy Lee Jones never became a character I particularly rooted for and he film just sort of peters out. Bringing in Meryl Streep at the end was supposed to replace the female star power the film lost, but her character doesn't get enough time to make enough of an impact.

I think that's the point, he's a louse, who can't get along properly without her, and tries with horrible results to honor her memory.

I get that this is supposed to be the point, but the film fails on a dramatic level because his character is never as interesting as she is and the air just goes out of the whole thing. A film like Psycho, which took out its protagonist one third in,then shifted its focus to Norman Bates, who was a character who held my attention and that's what needs to happen when you kill off the lead.

not only does the film headscratchingly kill its most interesting character, but it does so in a way that utterly betrays both who she was supposed to be up to that moment and also, pretty much, the entire conceptual and thematic underpinning of the narrative.

First off, I really liked the movie, so you can hold that against me in my evaluation. I thought her death was really played appropriately. For me the film was about the gender roles these characters inhabit. She had to do just enough tough guy stuff to make her seem invincible, before they pull the carpet out from under you, and make you realize that she's still incredibly fragile, despite her perseverance. Also, she'd reached the end of the road. Once TLJ rejects her, there is a feeling that she couldn't dig any lower for a mate. Something that was established as very important to her. TLJ then proceeds to run amok and much too late hold her on some invented pedestal that soon crumbles in his rather incapable hands. Obviously, the implication is that she's not the first to be neglected and forgotten in this manner. For me the weak part was the passage of time. This was taking place over a number of months, but felt more like days. I also have no idea what the implication was concerning the pastors Wife, or if this scene was meant as a small bit of silver lining.

It seemed to me like she had no idea what she had gotten herself into taking in those girls, and had possibly even forgotten she offered to do so. She didn't even know where to put them when they came in, and was much more grateful to have a wagon to sell than three sick women to care for. The whole trip was most likely for naught in the end.

I think the point of Mary Cuddy's suicide is precisely its plausibility, however much it may affront conventional narrative expectations. The director and screen writers were surely amply aware that Cuddy is a stronger, more interesting, and more likable character than Briggs, and the character they have established as the central protagonist. I think we're meant to feel bereft of her presence for the remainder of the film. This intentional effect may be a failed experiment for those who didn't like it, but I reject the charge of mere ineptitude.