Tommy Lee Jones' The Homesman is a melancholy Western from the filmmaker/star,
featuring a large ensemble full of remarkable talent.
Jones, who directed the superb Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in 2005,
demonstrates his clear enthusiasm for the genre via his exceptionally sympathetic depiction of a compelling story.
He also co-starred in the moving The Missing, which was artistically distinct from this elegiac historical epic
but yet very much in the Western family. Jones stars as a washed-up, oddball "homesman"
whose cards appear to be marked when we first meet him, and Hilary Swank as a brave,
resourceful lone ranger tasked with transporting three disturbed women across the plains to the Mississippi River,