Dir:

Tommy Lee Jones

With: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Grace Gummer

Runtime: 123 minutes

THOUGH wild horses rarely drag them from a cliche or ten, the western has hardly been a stranger to innovation down the years. From the mould-breaking comedy Blazing Saddles to the indie period drama Meek's Cutoff, modern tales set way out west have occasionally blazed a trail.

The Homesman, directed by Tommy Lee Jones, who also stars, continues this tradition in that it has ambitions to see how the west was won, or lost, from the female point of view. A refreshing spin on an old yarn, one might think. After all, the settling of America, like the settling of everywhere else, had to have been an equal opportunities matter, unless cowboys, alone among mankind, were able to self-reproduce.

Credit where it is due, The Homesman does boost the female employment rate in westerns by a hefty amount, and it has an estimable performance from Hilary Swank in the lead.

Those pluses aside, however, it is about as mould-breaking as a marshmallow hammer.

Unless, that is, it has somehow become fashionable again to portray women as desperate spinsters or otherwise a couple of horses short of a rodeo. If it is to bear any distinguishing label, The Homesman is as much a Tommy Lee Jones western as anything else.

Adapted from the novel by Glendon Swarthout, the picture opens with a woman front and centre. Miss Mary Bee Cuddy (Swank) is ploughing the dirt.

"Come on, girls," she exhorts the horses as all do their best with what they have. Elsewhere in Nebraska territory, all is death and other woes. Diptheria has robbed a mother of her children, infertility has stolen another's reason, and yet another wife finds herself lost to madness. There appear to be only four women of child-bearing age in the tiny community, Cuddy included, and three of them, it is decided, will have to be taken back east where they can hopefully recover.

Since no man will volunteer for the job, Miss Cuddy is landed with it. So it is that she collects the trio of women one day like so much recycling (you know how it is, one week it is mad women at the kerb, the next paper and glass), and prepares to retrace her steps. Assisting her reluctantly in the task is George Briggs (Jones), a claim-jumper who finds it convenient to get out of town and who is being paid by Miss Cuddy to escort the unhappy band.

As the five head into the wilderness again the trek does indeed prove to be, as a preacher had forecast, "long, difficult and dangerous". He was right on the long part, especially. This is Jones's second feature film as director after 2005's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

In The Homesman, he very much favours the low peep approach to westerns. Stuff happens to the party, but each incident is dispensed with quickly as if Jones the director cannot wait to get back to the atmosphere and character building he is so keen on. All of which makes for a film which travels at the pace of molasses running uphill.

The three women (one of whom is Grace Gummer, the daughter of Meryl Streep, who later makes an appearance in the film) do not have much to do other than come across as deranged and observe the thaw of sorts between Miss Cuddy and Mr Briggs.

For all that the cast is female dominated, the picture comes down to being a two-hander between Swank and Jones, the former deserving of even more screen time than she gets.

Swank is such a cruelly underused actor these days, and, for giving her talent the kind of wide open space in which it can flourish, Jones should be congratulated. Not that he skimps on his own screen-time, mind. If there is a grandstanding speech to be made, you will find the star of No Country for Old Men and The Fugitive at the front of the queue. In the current west as in the old west, times change, but not that much, that quickly.