Netflixing ~ The Homesman

We Netflixed into the movie The Homesman one night this week. Tommy Lee Jones is always good value, and in this case he not only took a leading part in the film, he directed it, and co-wrote the screenplay. The film is an adaptation of Glendon Swarthout's novel of the same name, a novel that has, I understand, been waiting for years for its transition to film. Originally the rights were owned by Paul Newman, then Sam Shepard, but neither was able to gave it the push it needed. If Newman or Shepard had intended taking the leading male role, much as I admire(d) both actors, in my opinion they'd not have made as good a "George Briggs" as did Tommy Lee Jones.

The film is one of those "warts an' all" stories of how the west - or west-ish - territories of the US were trying to be "won" by intrepid 19th century pioneers. The Homesman tale begins in the wild empty expanse of Nebraska territory in the 1850s. A small community of settlers has sprung up in Loup, near the Loup River. A few families are trying to survive amid devastating conditions, high winds, snow, ice, dust, poverty, on small farms, a long distance from the next small town.

In Loup we meet Mary Bee Cuddy, a farmer, she's living alone, unmarried, a former teacher from New York. She is relatively successfully farming her own small spread. Not all the females of Loup are coping as successfully as Cuddy though. Three (four in the novel, I think) have completely lost their sanity from trying to cope with the harsh conditions, loss of multiple children from disease (diphtheria), loss of love for their husbands many of whom have grown coarse and unfeeling, and ultimately loss of all hope. The townspeople, under advice from their church minister, have decided that the three women must be escorted back eastward to Iowa, where another minister's wife has established a help centre for the mentally unstable.

The men refuse the task of homesman (escorting immigrants back to their previous homes, or to another location). Mary Bee Cuddy (played by Hilary Swank) volunteers for the job. Cuddy has, not so secretly, wanted to marry, has even proposed marriage to single male neighbours, but has been turned down more than once due to her perceived bossy nature and plain appearance. She's not pretty-pretty, but she certainly ain't exactly plain to my eye. Ironically, the guy we see turning her proposal down is plug-ugly (as they used to say) himself, but that didn't matter, did it? Maybe they didn't have mirrors!

Cuddy realises almost immediately after setting out on her homesman duties that she'll need help. Fate or fortune brings her onto a path where a claim jumper, seated on a mule, has been left to hang. Cuddy persuades him that if she rescues him he must accompany and help her. "George Briggs" as the claim jumper calls himself is played by Tommy Lee Jones, of course, and is at his surly best.

I'll not give away the continuing storyline. There are lots of good reviews, of varied opinions, on line for anyone interested and unlikely to read the book or see the film.

The film reminded me of several others. First off I thought of Lonesome Dove, due mainly to the fact that both stories involve a long journey across wild territory, both with Tommy Lee Jones involved. Then, the unlikely mix of personalities portrayed in The Homesman: educated, bordering on sophisticated Mary Bee Cuddy and unruly, unprincipled, wild-eyed George Briggs simply had to bring to mind the pair of characters in that classic movie African Queen. Another "warts an' all" western, of more recent years, Unforgiven - a Clint Eastwood film - came to mind also.

The harshness of life for women pioneers was never properly addressed in all those sentimental, comfortable early western movies with which we grew familiar in the 1950/60s, and even later than that. There's a lovely statue/sculpture up in Ponca City, Oklahoma titled "Pioneer Woman", erected in honour of such women, but even the woman in the statue looks well-fed and prosperous compared to the women of The Homesman.

As we watched the movie I recalled a tiny group of marked graves we came across several years ago beside Talimena Drive, on the border of Oklahoma and Arkansas. Someone had left a plastic covered note on one of the small graves telling how it marked the resting place of a child of 6 years who had been killed by wolves, after her parents, pioneer settlers, had died. I've never forgotten that telling marker.

In The Homesman a nice point is made about civilisation in general. Harsh and crude as conditions were for early settlers, who themselves often descended into hardness and crudeness, there was still a kind of unspoken code of ethics and morality going on. People would help each other, come to aid of anyone when in difficulty, for instance. But, in an oddly out-of-place segment of The Homesman story, Tommy Lee Jones' character, transporting the three deranged women, comes upon a rather fancy hotel in the middle of nowhere (quite literally middle of nowhere).

A snazzily dressed would-be nobleman, in charge of the hotel (Irish accent clunkily affected by the otherwise wonderful James Spader) refuses food and rest to the starving travellers who haven't eaten for three days. The reason, he offers: he awaits a group of investors who will fill the hotel, speculators aiming to build a new "civilisation" in this wilderness. A huge spread of good food is awaiting the expected guests. After gentle, and not so gentle, begging by George Briggs, for at least some food for the women, Spader's character remains unmoved and refuses. So this is going to be the flavour of new "civilisation": cold, unfeeling, grasping. (This thought must have crossed Tommy Lee Jones' mind as director, and that of his fictional character, George Briggs).

It's not a great movie, but it's a good one for anyone interested in US history - the quiet, unsung history, not the well-known razzmatazz variety. Even if not historically-minded though, there are interesting relationship issues, civilisation issues, personality issues, redemption (or not) issues, women's issues to be discovered and pondered upon, all barely under the story's surface.

Movies and Messages ~ Million $ Baby, Crash, In the Valley of Elah

It was by chance rather than good management that we've watched three movies in the past couple of weeks in which Canadian director, producer and screenwriter, Paul Haggis had involvement. Two of the films were shown on HBO the other I'd picked up on DVD, in a junk store:
Million Dollar Baby,
Crash,
In the Valley of Elah.

Haggis was screenwriter and producer of two of the films which were also consecutive Best Picture award winners in 2004/5, Million Dollar Baby, and Crash, which he also directed. In the Valley of Elah (2007) had Paul Haggis as screenwriter (adaptation), director and producer.

I've nothing much to say about Million Dollar Baby, other than it was a well-acted, and an oddly engaging tale of a female who had the strange obsession to become a prize-winning boxer. I felt let down by the ending, but I guess it stands as a dire warning to those who might be nurturing similar obessions.

The other two movies had a lot more general relevance to life in the 21st century.


Crash, set in Los Angeles, puts the focus squarely on racism in the USA. The embedded message applies equally elsewhere, of course. Crash uses what I think of as "the tangled net" method of story-telling. A number of totally unconnected characters are introduced, and by the end of the movie we find they are linked in some way to at least one of the other characters, often to several. The Crash characters all have different ethnic backgrounds: African American, Middle-Eastern, Asian-American, Mexican, Caucasian, Latin-American (hope I didn't forget any). There is heavy stereotyping, and that is a drawback, but in this film it was necessary to get a point across in limited time. Each incident and reaction is drawn in extreme terms - cartoonish in fact. After I'd watched the film my first reaction was that it wasn't at all true to life, it was more like distilled version, keeping only the strongest flavours intact. It reminded me a bit of the way people sometimes train a puppy not to soil the living room carpet by rubbing its nose in the mess. Our noses were rubbed in the mess we sometimes make of relationships with others of different background from ourselves.

So as not to end on a completely negative note, Paul Haggis made sure that he did show that most characters though their bad traits were horrendous, had a decent, or even heroic, side too. Whether this was a cop out to stop audiences hating the movie I cannot say. I saw only one truly decent guy in the film - a Mexican locksmith.

I was glad to have seen the movie, but it left me part-irritated by the hyperbole, part glad that someone was at least attempting to point out how destructive racism can be.

In the Valley of Elah had a message too: war de-sensitises, war de-humanises.

The Last scene of In the Valley of Elah sees Tommy Lee Jones asking a guy to fly a worn and tattered Stars and Stripes in upside down position. His dead soldier son had sent him the flag. I had to look up the meaning of flying the US flag upside down; it means: "we are in distress".

We watched the movie on HBO, but had missed the first 15 minutes. I'd avoided this film when shown in the past, even though Tommy Lee Jones stars and is one of my favourite actors. I'd assumed it to be a war movie set in Iraq. We decided to give it a spin for half an hour or so to see whether it was as bad as I'd feared. It wasn't - and I'm very glad to have seen it at last. It's a story, based on real events, of a soldier's father seeking answers about his son's death, not in Iraq, but after his return to a military base in New Mexico.

Rather than recite the storyline here, Peter Bradshaw's 2008 review in The Guardian was a good one. My own takeaway from the movie was an underlining of something of which I was already aware: military action and war can brutalise and de-humanise even the best intentioned of humans. How many young soldiers come home alive but destroyed inside? How many commit suicide? How many come back with changed personalities - and not for the better?



Tommy Lee Jones' understated acting style, in the father's role was exactly right for an ex-Military Police officer with service in Vietnam, who has now lost the lives of his two sons to the army - one way or another. While watching the film I recalled another, from the past, in which Tommy Lee Jones played a character, a marine blighted by the war in Vietnam who, in the end, committed suicide: Heaven and Earth.



Crash and In the Valley of Elah are Two movies with messages that are important, very hard to miss and equally hard to disagree with. Paul Haggis did a good job!

Monday Movies ~ Polar opposite tales: Bloodworth and The Company Men

Last weekend, without realising it at the time, the two movies I chose to rent had characters, locations and storylines which were exact polar opposites: Bloodworth and The Company Men. Both are fairly recent releases, neither had reached our local cinema. I chose them purely because of the actors involved: Kris Kristofferson (long time favourite singer, writer, actor), in Bloodworth; Tommy Lee Jones (long time favourite actor) in The Company Men.

The two storylines depict aspects of life in today's USA, throwing into strong relief stark variations existing here, in different areas, different layers of poverty and wealth, and in different ways of dealing with the circumstances into which a person can find themself due to the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune".

For astrologically interested passing readers, I've already posted notes on natal charts of Kris Kristofferson HERE, and Tommy Lee Jones (HERE). Another excellent actor from Company Men, Chris Cooper's natal chart has been investigated by me HERE.

In Bloodworth we peer into life in deepest Tennessee, even though the movie was shot in North Carolina. The film is an adaptation of a novel, Provinces of Night, by southern gothic author William Gay. Kristofferson plays the long absent patriarch of the family Bloodworth, who tries to return to the rancid bosom of his family after suffering a stroke. He left home, wife and three sons 40 years earlier for a mysterious reason only hinted at in flashback. In his long absence the family hasn't prospered. Wife has gone dotty, one son isn't far behind her, another son has become a sleazy country music producer in Nashville (Val Kilmer gamely hamming it up), the third son, as we meet him, is seeking a wife who has absconded, he's a less than attentive fatherly presence to his young son Fleming, played by Reece Thompson.



When Grandpa arrives, Fleming, high school drop out, but aspiring writer, is the only family member to offer assistance and friendship to the old guy, played perhaps rather too sympathetically by Kristofferson.

The cinematography is one of the best things - lovely atmospheric scenes and colours. I suspect the book might fill in many of the blanks left in the movie, which starts at an appropriately southern languid pace, but steps up to a sweaty canter at the end, making what was originally a believable tale seem overly contrived.

Scenes from Bloodworth remained in memory though - so the film makers must have done something right.


The Company Men - set in a polar opposite location to rural Tennessee: urban Boston. Featuring polar opposite personalities from those seen in Bloodworth: urban corporate men living what used to be called The American Dream - in huge houses filled with every luxury imaginable, Porche cars, spoiled wives and offspring, living lives the like of which Bloodworths had not ever even dreamed about. The script is by John Wells, TV writer, director, producer, known best for ER and West Wing.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a rather dour (of course) Gene McClary co-founder of a now major and up to now successful corporation, originally shipbuilders but currently with fingers in all manner of pies. 21st century disease of "downsizing" and redundancies hovers over the corporation as the movie begins, and spreads its infection rapidly. One of the first of the upper echelons of employees to go is Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), VP of sales department, mid-thirties husband and father living high off the hog; doesn't deal at all well with changed circumstances. His wife, a nurse, keeps the family ship from sinking altogether. Phil Woodward (the excellent Chris Cooper), a guy who has been with the company from its earliest days, rising from shop floor level to middle management, now nearing 60 and now jobless.




Last to go, outspoken co-founder Gene McClary gets the chop by his cold-hearted partner, for daring to criticise continued desecration of their company in order to placate a deity of shareholders. I couldn't help relating what went on in these scenes to ancient sacrificial offerings to the gods of old.

The movie describes how each man deals with his changed circumstances.
It's a deadly serious movie - no laughs at all. Performances by the three leads are strong and believable as is Kevin Costner's out of norm character turn as Affleck's grumpy but well-meaning brother-in-law who runs his own small construction firm, also not in the best of straits, but keeping going under difficult circumstances in order to keep his guys in employment. A sharp reminder that small businesses too feel the pinch, but small businessmen are human, with a heart, wereas corporations are money-making machines, without a heart.

In both Bloodworth and Company Men there's a light at the end of a dark tunnel, but only in the closing scenes.

An oddity I realised while drafting this post: In Bloodworth character actor Barry Corbin played a minor but beautifully drawn part as owner of a run-down rural bar; in Company Men I saw Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper. All three actors all had main roles in one of my all-time favourite TV mini-series, Lonesome Dove. Tommy was Captain Woodrow Call, Chris Cooper was July Johnson (and will always be remembered so by me), and Barry Corbin was Roscoe Brown. Three wonderful actors, none of whom (even Tommy L.J.) has ever received fully the acclaim they deserve.

Astrological Twins ~ Tommy Lee Jones & Oliver Stone

In keeping with the times, back to a Virgo theme: astrological twins born in the USA on 15 September 1946, with Sun/Mercury in that sign: Movie actor Tommy Lee Jones and movie writer/director Oliver Stone. Cities and times of birth are the only differences in the two natal charts. Tommy Lee Jones was born in Texas, Oliver Stone in New York; Jones at 10:00 PM, Stone at 9:58 AM (Astrodatabank). Natal charts are shown together, below.



The two men are friends, and have collaborated professionally on three occasions to date, in the movies JFK, Heaven & Earth, and Natural Born Killers. It's not easy to detect, from on-line sources, whether their personalities, outside of professional life, are in any way similar. They are sharing a rather well-worn "crumpled" look in their later years.


Jones has the reputation of being difficult on set, critical and demanding of his fellow cast members (Virgo in action) and quite at ease playing "difficult" character pieces. Stone's movies are almost always controversial in one way or another, framed to provoke his audience and get them thinking. There's much political content, often critical (Virgo), in his films, describing the direct human consequences of national policy, in both halls of government, and in board rooms of corporate financiers.

Though now sporting that decidedly crumpled look, in his younger years Jones had a darkly handsome and mysterious attraction, probably thanks to a mix of Welsh and Native American genes. Until his more recent films, not directed by Stone, we hadn't seen his lighter side and feel he has for humour. This reflects his lighter Gemini, ascendant, as compared to Stone's heavier Scorpio rising.






Virgo Sun/Mercury reflects their shared critical nature. Both have Moon in Taurus, at different degrees, but in harmonious earthy trine to their Sun/Mercury. In Stone's case Moon lies in challenging square aspect to Pluto (planet of power) which connects to his anti-government stance; whereas Tommy Lee Jones' natal Moon, a few degrees further along in Taurus doesn't produce the same intense square. Both men's Sun/Mercury square Uranus - with rebellious Uranus spiking their otherwise practical, common sense Virgo/Taurus Sun/Moon mix.

(Right, Jones' characters from JFK and Natural Born Killers.)

Mars (war and energetic sports) and Jupiter (excess) are conjoined in both charts - in Jones' case this can be seen as connecting to his love of polo, a sport at which he excels. In Stone's case Jupiter/Mars in Libra, just a couple of degrees from his Scorpio ascendant (ruled by Mars, planet of war), connects to his determination to enlist in the army in 1967
(when he could easily have avoided the Vietnam war).
He specifically requested combat duty too, was later decorated for courage under fire (Bronze Star & Purple Heart), and returned to civilian life with a deep disgust for war, especially for the war in Vietnam.




I first saw Tommy Lee Jones long ago in the the lead role of TV mini-series, The Executioner's Song(not directed by Stone). He turned in a brilliant performance and has been a favourite ever since. His performance in another TV mini-series Lonesome Dove served to stengthen my opinion of him as an actor. I didn't enjoy him as much in Stone's JFK, declined to see him in Natural Born Killers because of its violence, and though I admired his acting in Heaven and Earth found the movie depressing, much more so than The Executioner's Song....which does seem rather strange.

After having seen both natal charts, I suspect my preference for Tommy Lee Jones' work, over Oliver Stone's is likely a result of Jones' Airy Gemini ascendant - which must strongly appeal to my Airy Aquarius Sun.
Though Stone's Watery Scorpio ascendant matches my natal Watery Cancer ascendant - but this doesn't work as well, or so it seems! I do agree with most of Stone's political views though, I'm just not keen on the way he presents them on screen.

So then, both astrological twins display a flair for presenting challenging and controversial topics and characters in uncompromising fashion. Both are critical by nature - one critical of his fellow actors, the other of the US political scene. Neither exactly matches the stereotypical Hollywood star or director.

Internet Movie Database
Tommy Lee Jones http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000169/
Oliver Stone http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000231/

Astrology Found Lurking In Arty-Farty Movie

Among the booty brought back from our last trip was a DVD ($1) - the slim jacket attracted me: photograph of a young Tommy Lee Jones, long-time favourite of mine, and an astrological glyph. The title Eliza's Horoscope. I'd thought I knew of all Tommy's movies but had never heard of this one, from the early 1970s. I've since discovered that it was the only film made by Canadian writer/director Gordon Sheppard. It won several awards on release, then disappeared without trace until some pirated copies hit DVD status after Tommy Lee Jones was Oscared for The Fugitive. An interesting article by Sheppard about the film's history is HERE.


Back in the New Mexico junk shop, a glance at the blurb on the jacket had indicated to me an early example of a chick flick. With astrology as part of the storyline, this one was for me!

Boy! Chick flick? Was I wrong! This was another in the same genre as The Holy Mountain , mentioned in a previous post. An "art" film. There's the faintest imprint of a chick flick there, but a mass (or mess) of would-be Fellini-esque arty-fartyness, possibly meant to be symbolic, heavily overlays it. We watched in quiet astonishment, unable to switch off for fear of missing the point of this 2 hour stint in front of the TV.

A quick run-down of the storyline: Eliza is a naive country lass, with Sun in Pisces, come to the big city, Montreal, to have her horoscope done and, she hopes, find the love of her life, and have a child. She visits an old Chinese astrologer (Rose Quong) in a run-down lodging house. The astrologer undertakes to calculate her horoscope/natal chart and have it ready in a couple of days. This, of course, was well before the advent of astrology software.

Eliza (Elizabeth Moorman) stays in the lodging/flop-house with a middle-aged off-the-wall religious theatrical woman, who encourages Eliza to abandon her astrological quest and turn to Catholicism. She soon meets another of the manic residents, Tommy Lee Jones who plays Tom, Aries, a Native American construction worker with plans to blow up a city bridge in protest against the government. Tom falls for Eliza, but Eliza has other plans. He takes Eliza to meet his grandmother, a lovely Native American lady who tells Eliza how life has changed since settlers industrialised the city and the area.

On returning to the astrologer, Eliza is told, with the aid of two hand-drawn charts, that she will meet, during the next 10 days, the love of her life, a handsome man "full of riches" who will be either Sagittarius or Aries - but there will be danger.

Now, as all good astrology buffs know, no astrologer could possibly divine that much detail with any degree of accuracy....but the movie uses artistic licence I guess. Anyway, the prediction sets Eliza on track to find her wealthy man, leading to several encounters which grow weirder and weirder. There's a guy who has a larger than lifesize model of a centaur in his house, upon which he loves to ride, with assistance from a pretty assistant (Eliza). Then there's a wealthy composer, played by Richard Manuel of The Band, who feigns interest in astrology and lures Eliza to a peculiar quazi-religious orgy peopled by hippie-like cultists.

Behind all this are entwined flashes from Eliza's earlier life, the death of her young brother, and other, indecipherable mysteries. There's a feeling of nightmare or drug-induced vision throughout.


Tom blows up his bridge and gets himself shot in the ensuing chase.

Eliza realises, too late, that Tom was "the one", his "riches" being spiritual, stemming, I guess from his desire to fight oppression.

This is a movie - bad as it is - which can be interpreted in several ways. I've outlined a straightforward version above, but have since read reviews by some who see the film as having a religious and anti-astrology, or spiritual, or even political significance. One reviewer wrote :

Eliza's Horoscope, can even be seen, I should think (knowing nothing of the film-maker's politics), as a kind of Marxist parable populated by those whom the world of commerce has cast aside, ruined (the boarders in the lodging house, the American Indians), or whom the world has rewarded with ill-deserved riches and the ability to indulge their rottenness.

Yes - now I can see that! Maybe I'll need to watch it again......or perhaps not, at least not without several large measures of Scotch.