A large cast and a delicate interpretation of Tommy Lee Jones' compelling story make The Homesman a melancholy Western.
Hilary Swank excels as Mary Bee Cuddy, a self-sufficient woman transporting three unstable women.
A great ensemble of Western performers brings their own gravitas to the film, creating a well-told and captivating story.
The Homesman, a melancholy Western from director/star Tommy Lee Jones, also features a large cast filled with exceptional talent.
Jones, who has experience in the director's chair after taking over the superb Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in 2005, demonstrates his blatant love of the genre through his very delicate handling of a touching story.
He co-starred in the moving The Missing, a movie with a distinct aesthetic from this elegiac historical epic but one that is nonetheless very much a member of the Western genre.
The outstanding Hilary Swank plays a brave, resourceful lone ranger charged with transporting three disturbed women across the plains to the Mississippi River,
each of whom has experienced severe trauma, while Tommy Lee Jones stars as a washed-up, oddball "homesman" whose cards appear to be marked when we first meet him.