The Homesman is one fantastic movie. Reviews comparing it to Unforgiven are misleading. There is no massive gun fight. The beginning is rather dark with a woman throwing a live baby down the hole in an out house because it wasn’t a son. Yeah, you’ve never seen that in a movie before or at least I hadn’t!
You can watch this movie for free on Fawesome. It has an awful lot of big name actors playing bit roles. Matt Damon, John Lithgow, James Spader, Meryl Streep, and William Fichtner to name a few. When a famous actor like Tommy Lee Jones is both acting and directing they can get friends to do things. In fact, I recommend you watch Badland Doves immediately in front of this movie. Those of you who do not understand my comment about “it wasn’t a failure of acting, it was a failure of everything else” will understand if you watch that movie and right behind it this one. Tommy Lee and crew got the “everything else” right.
The Synopsis
A pious unmarried woman of 31 years age is selected by drawing lots to transport three women driven insane by frontier life back to a church run sanitarium in Iowa. They aren’t “happy go lucky” crazy either. The town folk build her a prisoner transport wagon complete with ten iron tie down loops inside.
Along the way she runs into Tommy Lee’s character hanging from a rope, sitting on his horse, and hires him to help her. Nobody else in this God fearing town would go with her on the five week journey through Indian territory.
Early minutes of The Homesman spend time showing just how nuts these women were. I mean the one perpetually sweeping a dirt floor to get it clean wasn’t bad compared to the others.
Humor
This could have been a damned depressing movie. Given the subject matter and the early footage it could have been a movie that made you give up on the human race. Humor saved it. The movie did not explain Mary Bee Cuddy came to have her own farm out on the frontier. It said she was from New York state and never married. One is left with the impression that she was so desperate to find a husband she made the journey herself.
Oh, that’s not a male chauvinist pig talking. That’s a story about the western frontier handed down through history. Rent The Substitute Wife starring Farrah Fawcett. A woman finds out she has cancer and has to travel to a distant town and find a whore (played by Farrah) to come be the mother of her children after she passes. There were no other women around. Farrah had a great line I remember to this day.
Put a skirt on a warthog and men will marry it out here!
Farrah’s great zinger
I took that little movie detour so you will understand just how much of an insult it was for Mary Bee Cuddy to be told by a man she had just fed and suggested marriage to that he wouldn’t marry her. He was going back east to find a wife. Why?
You’re plainer than a tin cup and way too bossy.
Marriage rejection
Summary
The Homesman is a dark movie that you will laugh your ass off watching. Hilary plays the desperate pious woman to a T. Tommy Lee simply has a gift for dead pan humor and it is all over in this film. That scene when he brings back a run away crazy woman and a strange horse is precious. If you think about it at the moment, it also shows just how dangerous what they were doing was.
For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.
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