The Homesman

The Homesman

Rating 2 out of 10


I am a fan on western and cowboy movies.  John Wayne was the best.  I would easily put Lonesome Dove in the top ten things I have ever watched.  Maybe top five.  Tommy Lee Jones is perfection as Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call. So maybe I set the bar a little high walking in the theater.  Sadly I was greatly disappointed.  I'm guessing this movie came from a great book and was the love child of one of the actors.  It did not transfer over well to film.

This movie is based in the frontier 1800s where people are trying to make it in the new country by farming and or cows or sheep.  Mary Bee Cuddy (Hillary Swank) is a tough woman.  Rough on the inside and out.  She successfully runs her farm and desperately wants a husband.

One of the many side effects of living on the frontier is the wives go insane at an alarming rate.  I'm guessing loneliness or the sound of the wind constantly blowing.  We see an example when one of the frustrated wives tosses her baby into the port-potty.  Someone needs to take three of the crazy women to the city where they can hopefully get help.  None of the men will go so Mary Bee volunteers for the 6-8 week one way trip through dangerous lands.  She is hoping in the city she can find a man to agree to be her husband.  Along the way she picks up a straggler old man George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) who is being hung for squatting another mans land and eating his sheep.  Mary gives him the choice of being hanged or go with her.  He should have taken the noose.

The cast is nothing short of amazing.  Meryl Streep and her daughter Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, John Lithgow, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Barry Corbin, ect.  They stand no chance of helping this slow moving, boring film.  It has a run time of just over two hours and seems much longer.

In case you haven't figured it out by this point I didn't care for this film at all.  I wouldn't even rent this one folks.