[projekktor id=’16348′]
The Homesman is a western based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout. It is co-written and directed by Tommy Lee Jones, who also stars alongside Hilary Swank, Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow, and James Spader. The film premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
When three women living on the edge of the American frontier are driven mad by harsh pioneer life, the task of saving them falls to the pious, independent-minded Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank). Transporting the women by covered wagon to Iowa, she soon realizes just how daunting the journey will be, and employs a low-life drifter, George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), to join her. The unlikely pair and the three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter) head east, where a waiting minister and his wife (Meryl Streep) have offered to take the women in. But the group first must traverse the harsh Nebraska Territories marked by stark beauty, psychological peril and constant threat.
Though the setting and story seem to define The Homesman as a western, Jones isn’t as quick to label his film that way. “I don’t know how you define the term western,” says Jones. “I have the impression that a western is a movie that has horses in it and big hats and that takes place in the 19th century on the west side of the Mississippi river, although I’ve read critics who are bold enough to call a science-fiction movie a western. It’s a term that people use so often that I don’t think it has much meaning anymore.”
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