Plenty of words might describe Mary Bee Cuddy, the Nebraska farmer played by Hilary Swank in "The Homesman." A paragon of pioneer self-sufficiency, she is capable and conscientious, industrious and morally upright. Her prosperity looks like the visible reward of a sturdy work ethic, and she takes pride in her tidy and well-appointed wooden house, set amid the sod-sided hovels of her fellow homesteaders.

Mary Bee is treated with frank admiration by the local minister (John Lithgow) and with grudging respect by other neighbors. But the words flung in her direction — on two separate occasions, by two different men, both spurning her offer of marriage — are "bossy" and "plain." The point of "The Homesman," directed by Tommy Lee Jones and based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel of the same name, is not that these adjectives are inappropriate. Swank is about as far from plain as it’s possible for a human being to be. The point is that even in situations where toughness is paramount and survival is at stake, a woman will still be judged by her looks and her docility.

Set in a flat, unforgiving stretch of the American frontier in the decade before the Civil War, "The Homesman" is both a captivating Western and a meticulous, devastating feminist critique of the genre. Jones, who rides alongside Swank as a whiskery ruffian known as Briggs, uses Western iconography to dismantle a familiar set of romantic myths. Most basically, the journey Briggs and Mary Bee undertake is not further into the West but back toward the East. It is a trek that originates in failure, passes through frustration and concludes on ambiguous notes of sorrow, resignation and cynicism.

‘THE HOMESMAN’ Rated: R Opens Friday at Kahala 8

In the early scenes, Mary Bee — walking behind a mule-drawn plow, tending livestock, making supper and playing silent music on an embroidery keyboard — evokes the world of John Ford. She has carried civilization into the wilderness and in the face of adversity has upheld its values of cleanliness, godliness and culture. Briggs, on the other hand, arrives on the scene in a literal blast of Looney Tunes slapstick. After a bomb is sent down his chimney, he stumbles into the frame in his long johns, covered in soot, a plume of smoke rising from his disheveled head. It’s as if Yosemite Sam had turned up in the pages of a Willa Cather novel.

As an actor, Jones is well within his comfort zone playing an irascible old coot. As a director, he is both canny and bold, dropping bits of backwoods humor into an austere landscape dominated by violence and anguish. (This is his second feature, after "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.") The reason Briggs and Mary Bee are headed back across the river to Iowa is that three local women have gone mad and need to be brought back home. The causes of their distress are clear enough: dead children, bad land, brutal husbands. They need to be sent away for their own good but also because their presence is a rebuke to the fledgling settlement’s idea of itself.

Mary Bee accepts the job of transporting the women and extorts Briggs’ help after she saves his life. Her compassion and his patience are tested by their passengers. Gro Svendsen (Sonja Richter), a Norwegian woman with an especially nasty mate, howls and bites. Arabella Sours (Grace Gummer), barely more than a child, refuses to move or speak, clutching the rag doll that is her substitute for the babies she lost. Theoline Belknap (Miranda Otto), who drowned her own baby in a latrine, stares at the others, wide-eyed and disheveled.

The three are tied up and locked into a boxy wagon, which encounters some of the usual western trouble — a lawless gunslinger, a band of Indians, bad weather — as well as some less familiar problems. Jones’ primary interest is in the two main characters, who at first look like archetypal figures but evolve into complex, vulnerable, unpredictable human beings. Swank starts out emphasizing Mary Bee’s strength and stoicism, her acceptance of disappointment and her natural courage. At the end, we are left with a sadder, more enigmatic picture. Mary Bee, who once annoyed Briggs, now haunts him.

And he, too, is a haunting figure, an enigmatic alloy of decency, selfishness, murderous rage and tenderness. Originally the film’s exaggerated, folkloric comic spark, he winds up as its reality principle and the bearer of its tragic weight.

It may take time to absorb the sorrow of "The Homesman," to appreciate the odd rhythms and jarring surprises of its plot and to grasp its unsettling ideas about the American West and the larger civilization that conquered it. The movie shows us a cruel and beautiful place where grit is rewarded and goodness is betrayed, where venality and righteousness coexist and are sometimes hard to tell apart. A place that might look like home.

Review by A.O. Scott, New York Times

© 2014 The New York Times Company