Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman is a melancholic Western from the filmmaker/star — and it boasts a sprawling cast loaded with prodigious talent as well.
No stranger to the director’s chair, having taken the reins of the excellent Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in 2005, Jones showcases his very obvious affection for the genre via his particularly sensitive treatment of a moving tale.
He was also co-lead in the stirring The Missing, a different film stylistically to this elegiac historical epic, but still very much belonging to the Western family.
Headlining the cast is Jones himself as a washed-up, oddball “homesman” whose cards appear to marked when we first meet him, and the extraordinary Hilary Swank as a bold, resourceful lone ranger charged with transporting three disturbed women across the plains to the Mississippi River, each of them having suffered from severe trauma.
The ensemble is positively overflowing with names from John Lithgow to Meryl Streep,…
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