Reeling Backward: "Minority Report" (2002)

"Minority Report" is the most un-Spielberg film ever made by Steven Spielberg.

There is plenty of heartbreak and sadness in Spielberg's movies. Certainly fractured families are a central theme. He's made movies about the Holocaust, D-Day and World War I trenches. The film he made right before this one was "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," in which bereaved parents replace their dying son with a robot who's been tricked into thinking he's a real boy.

And yet, there is an undercurrent of light and hopefulness in his oeuvre that I find (mostly) missing in "Minority Report," though "A.I." probably comes closest in its dystopian themes and dour mood.

In both movies technology has led to seemingly amazing achievements to benefit society, but there's an insidious bargain underneath that threatens to upend the balance. That's not surprising since it was based on a short story by the immortal Philip K. Dick, whose fears about the future essentially created its own film genre, tech noir. It was adapted for the screen by John Cohen and Scott Frank.

I remember liking the film when it came out but not being amazed as other critics were. One of the areas I still find it lacking is the sense of an entire world being built around star Tom Cruise. Instead, it seems like Spielberg and his team created just enough pieces to serve as a backdrop, and no more. He doesn't paint in the corners.

There are the automated cars that move both horizontally and vertically, but other than a chase scene where Cruise leaps from vehicle to vehicle, they're not really explored as a (literally) transportive societal evolution. Things seem... pretty well the same as they are now. They even have The Gap, in a self-reflexive bit of product placement.

Though maybe the sameness is a commentary in and of itself.

Set in the year 2054, the film has been pointed to as being prescient in its depiction of coming technological upheaval. We obviously don't have the ability to predict the future or record thoughts into a video stream, though VR headsets can do a pretty good job of putting you into a created reality. And the mind-altering drug people use in the film, neuroin, bears disturbing similarities to the opioid epidemic of today.

All the newspapers and magazines automatically update with the latest headlines, which if you were in the news business in the early Aughts, the talk of "e-paper" being the format of the future was all the rage. Instead we turned to reading on hard, graceless, 4-inch screens.

Most interesting is the ever-present eye scanners, taking a cool gadget that's a staple of the spy and sci-fi genres and turning it into an intimating facet of a world where our movements are continuously tracked -- ostensibly for consumerist purposes, but as we quickly see the government is piggybacking on the gaze.

We don't use "eye-D," as it's called in the movie, so ubiquitously or without consent. But think about how our online explorations are customized through cookies and trackable data. Everyone knows how they've searched for a product and then seen ads for similar wares plastering our web carousing. Or getting a report every month from Google Maps telling you exactly where you've been, and when.

Most of us would be mortified to have our browser history made public. In the world of "Minority Report," everything about us is on continual surveillance and display, up to and including the things we think about doing. Literally, people are arrested and punished for things they were about to do.

The story is at its root a meditation on free will and predestination. Usually such tales are set against a theological backdrop -- if God determines our path, how are we really free to choose?

As a good Catholic boy growing up, I was instructed that thinking about committing an act is just a much a sin as actually doing it. This was taught as a way to forbid sinful thoughts, but as any pubescent soon realized, they're as impossible to shut out as the old saw of "Don't think about elephants."

I think it was George Carlin who observed that the majority of Catholics who lapsed figured out that if you were going to be punished equally for thinking about doing something, you might as well experience the fun of actually doing it.

("I'll take glaring holes in catechism for $1,000, Alex.")

The film largely eschews religious issues, other than the decoration of some people considering the three "precogs" as deities unto themselves. They are children born of early neuroin users with psychic gifts, which used in conjunction can read people's evil intents before even they themselves are aware of them.

Of course, this also involves being imprisoned in a floating "milk bath" that heightens their powers, kept eternally pumped full of hallucinogens and fawned over by a quite possibly lecherous keeper, Wally (Daniel London).

Agatha (Samantha Morton) is the "most gifted" of the three, twins Dashiell and Arthur basically serving as assist men to the true genius. The three are named after famous mystery writers, and were trained by Dr. Hineman (Lois Smith), now living out her days in lonesome regret.

As is often the case in real life, the creative partner was outlasted and outmaneuvered by the business shark, in this case Max von Sydow as Lamar Burgess, who is now desperate to take the "PreCrime" experiment from Washington D.C. to a national stage. This means jumping through small hoops held by big people.

Hence the arrival of the inquisitive mind of Danny Witwer, a wolf-like young assistant attorney general played by Colin Farrell in his breakout role in American films. He instantly focuses his attention on Chief John Anderton (Cruise), who is the heroic public face of PreCrime. John lost his own son in a bizarre abduction at a public swimming pool years earlier, tanking his marriage to Lara (Kathryn Morris) and turning him into a stealth neuroin user.

In early scene, John goes jogging through the shady part of D.C., his real purpose to obtain a fix, which he uses to heighten his mood while watching (crude) holographic home movies of his lost kid. The blind dealer removes his glasses to reveal cavernous empty eye sockets, seemingly revealing his very brains, with the admonishment, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!"

Watching the movie again, this line heralds a lot of high-contrast photography by cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, including a plethora of shots where one of a character's eyes are turned away or lost in shadow.

For me, the faster the movie's plot-stirring gets, the more I tend to lose interest as it gets into pure chase-chase mode. Neal McDonough plays Fletch, John's former right-hand man now charged with leading the hunt for him. "Everybody runs" is their mantra, leading to some slick action scenes with flying power suits and "sick sticks," glowing batons that instantly make their target retch.

In one of the movie's coolest but most inscrutable sequences, John goes to have his eyes swapped out in a black market procedure to fool the eye-D scans.

Peter Stormare plays the bottom-bucket doctor, who blows snot all over his hand right before sucking out John's eyeballs. In a riveting soliloquy, the not-good doctor reminds John -- now addled by anesthesia -- that the chief locked him away years ago for intentionally setting his patients on fire, and now back-alley eye jobs are the only medical work he can do.

It revs up to a classic "I shall have my revenge" declaration:

"For true enlightenment there is nothing like... well, let's just say taking a shower while this large fellow with an attitude you couldn't knock down with a hammer, that keeps whispering in your ear: 'Oh Nancy, Oh Nancy.' Now that was a lot of fun, thank you so very much John for putting me in there, thank you so very much for giving me an opportunity to get to know myself much better."

As near as I can figure, though, the doc never actually extracts any kind of revenge. He competently performs his job, at less than his usual rate, even. John has a nasty encounter with a putrid sandwich and spoiled milk placed in the fridge of his recovery flophouse, though they appear to be genuine accidents as he blindly reaches on the wrong shelf from where the fresh sustenance lies.

As much as I enjoy Stormare's effortless creepy presence and off-kilter line readings, this whole bit feels like a buildup to an important moment that never arrives. I believe the whole thing could be chopped down to quick montage and improve the pacing. Though this would maybe suck some of the life out of the subsequent house search by tiny "spiders," disc-like robots with wire-thin appendages deployed by the PreCrime brutes to infiltrate and forcibly eye-D people

Hence Cruise's green eyes become dark brown halfway through the movie. He keeps the old eyes in a plastic biggie to sneak back into the PreCrime HQ (no one thinking to lock out his profile, apparently) with the intent to have them put back one day, but comically loses one down a drain.

Tim Blake Nelson turns up as Gideon, the wheelchair-deployed officiate of the PreCrime "prison" where reside people judged and sentenced without actually committing any dastardly acts. They lie forever dreaming in plastic tubes, wearing coma-inducing "halos" around their heads like fallen angels as Gideon plays them orgiastic organ music to calm their prematurely damned souls.

As Nelson brings an innate disquieting anxiety to his roles, one instantly wonders if, like Wally, Gideon is supplanting his official duties with an occasional tug 'n' grope of his comelier charges.

John himself is briefly sentenced to the halo prison, his long run finally ending due to the machinations of Burgess, who is using his protege as the sacrificial pawn to ensure PreCrime is cleared for a national rollout. Lara springs him... surprisingly easily, and many have wondered if the film's entire last act is a big guffaw and everything we've seen is merely the imaginings of John, still trapped in his plastic prison on a never-ending high.

This would, of course, be a mirror of the finale of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil," one of my all-time favorite films and a clear inheritor of Philip K. Dick's prescient, precious paranoia. His cinematic children were legion, even without an official credit.

And while I don't think "Minority Report" is among the finest of the adaptations, it's a film that has aged rather well in nearly a couple of clicks down the big highway. There was even a briefly lived TV series a few years ago that came and went without me (or anyone) much noticing.

Things end on a (somewhat artificial) high note -- Burgess slain by his own hand, PreCrime disbanded and the not-yet criminals released, Agatha and the twins relocated from their enforced isolation in the pool to a self-imposed one in a lonely cottage on a Scottish cliff or wherever, free to live in the now and not the future.

John even caresses the swelling belly of Lara, their love reborn with another life and shot at parenthood. It seems that free will does reign, along with happy endings in Spielberg flicks -- even if it takes two-plus hours of haunting parable to get there.

Video review: "Just Mercy"

In last week’s column I spotlighted a movie, “Little Women,” which many thought magnificent but I blieve is merely good. This week I’d like to flip it and showcase a film hardly anybody saw, but I think was one of last year’s best.

Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx star in “Just Mercy,” a based-on-true story of an innocent man and the intrepid long lawyer who fought to have him freed. It’s a familiar tale but one told with heart, conviction and some absolutely wonderful performances.

Jordan is Bryan Steven, a recent Harvard Law School graduate who eschews the big firms to open up a legal defense fund for death row inmates in Alabama in the late 1980s, which at the time was notorious for hardly ever overturning convictions. Foxx is Johnnie D. McMillian, convicted of killing a drug store clerk even though multiple witnesses put him nowhere near the crime scene.

We know the patterns of this kind of movie: Johnnie distrusts Bryan at first, but then grows to believe this young man will fight for him, followed by various setbacks in the courts, a fraying of bonds, followed by redemption. I’m not giving anything away.

Rob Morgan plays Herbert Richardson, another convicted murderer whose case follows on a parallel pattern with Johnnie’s, who also comes to be represented by Bryan. There’s actually a section of the movie where Herbert’s story begins to overshadow the main plot.

Tim Blake Nelson is loathsome and yet oddly sympathetic as Ralph Myers, who testified against Johnnie in order to get out from under his own crimes. He’s full of ticks and shame, and seems like a reptile who keeps molting layers of skin to reveal new shadings underneath.

All four men give Oscar-worthy performances. Alas, “Just Mercy” was ignored by the awards juries and barely made a ripple at the box office. If I’m any judge, this one’s a near-masterpiece.

Bonus features are decent, though not expansive. There’s a making-of documentary, deleted scenes, a featurette on the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama and another titled “This Moment Deserves.”

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Review: "Just Mercy"

“Just Mercy” is a fire-and-brimstone drama about the death penalty that brooks no disagreement. The hero is a crusading lawyer fighting to free a wrongfully convicted man from death row, and the villains are sneering cracker racists who refuse to admit when they’re wrong because it would somehow upset the entrenched Old South order of whites over blacks.

This is the sort of movie with multiple text rolls during the end credits that laud the virtuous while lamenting how much left there is to do (complete with debatable statistics).

Set in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, it’s very much a civil rights message in the spirit the 1960s, a la “Mississippi Burning” or “Malcolm X.”

I might quibble with the film’s politics but not with its artistic achievement. “Just Mercy” is a terrifically emotional drama that really gets your juices pumping. There are times where you identify so strongly with the main character, attorney Bryan Stevenson played by Michael B. Jordan, that you want to leap through the screen and strangle his antagonists.

Stevenson was a Harvard-trained lawyer -- I lost count of how many times folks in the movie make note of “Harvard” -- who decided to eschew the big law firms to start a legal defense fund for convicted murderers in Alabama called the Equal Justice Initiative. Before Stephenson arrived, no Alabama death row inmate had ever had his sentence set aside.

As the movie presents him, this isn’t really so much a character as a symbol. We leave the theater knowing little more about the real Bryan Stevenson than we did going in.

“Cute. Married?” an older black woman asks about Stevenson just of earshot. “Married to his work,” his colleague responds.

So it goes with his portrayal by screenwriters Andrew Lanham and Destin Daniel Cretton, based on Stevenson’s own memoir. Cretton, who made the wonderful “Short Term 12” that boosted the career of Brie Larson and launched that of Lakeith Stanfield, also directs.

Speaking of Larson, she shows up in a supporting role as Eva Ansley, Stevenson’s legal aid who went against her own community to fight for death row inmates. She starts out as a feisty figure, and then the movie forgets about her.

The two key supporting performers are Jamie Foxx and Tim Blake Nelson as, respectively, Walter “Johnnie D.” McMillian and Ralph Myers, both convicted murderers. The difference being that Myers, a white man, did his crime and pinned another on the black McMillian at the behest of the local sheriff (a chilling Michael Harding). Myers received a light sentence and McMillian got the death penalty, despite overwhelming evidence that he was somewhere else at the time an 18-year-old white pharmacy worker was gunned down.

These are two ravishingly good performances that will likely compete for an Oscar nomination in the supporting actor category, which tends to be very competitive. Foxx gives McMillian a sort of unsophisticated dignity beneath his seething anger -- shades of Morgan Freeman in “The Shawshank Redemption.” Nelson, wearing burn scar makeup and an assortment of tics, seems ready to shuck out of his own skin.

Two other actors of note: Rafe Spall plays Tommy Champan, the young public-defender-turned-DA who seems like he might be sympathetic but enforces justice with an inordinate emphasis on the blindness aspect.

And Rob Morgan is magnificent as Herbert Richardson, another death row inmate. Richardson is a Vietnam vet suffering from PSTD who bears heavy shame for setting the bomb that killed someone -- an act he does not deny in its effects, in contrast to his intent.

The Richardson sequence is powerful, so much so that at times it ends up detracting from McMillian’s story rather than underscoring it or acting as counterpoint. For a while it actually becomes his movie, and indeed it felt like his story could support its own entire film.

At a quarter-past the two-hour mark, “Justice Mercy” could have done with some judicious paring. But it’s hard to deny how compelling this movie is in a gut-punch way.

It won’t get any awards for subtlety, but when you’re dealing with the life-and-death reality of a justice system that has too often convicted African-Americans for crimes they didn’t commit, how much equivocation do we really need?

Review: "The Report"

Near the beginning of "The Report," one character remarks that it's going to be very difficult to tell their story in a way people can understand. This is very much the filmmakers speaking through them to the audience, essentially warning us in advance about the complicated tale they're about to spin.

The good news is they tell this story about as well as it can be told. I'm reminded of "The Big Short," which managed to weave a complex tale with lots of moving parts into a coherent, impactful narrative.

The bad news is I fear too many people don't want to hear about the "enhanced interrogation techniques," or EITs, employed by the U.S. government in the years after the 9/11 attacks, or the (largely successful) attempts to sweep them under the rug. It's old news.

The report the title refers to was one issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014 after more than five years of careful and methodical investigation by a small team of congressional staffers. It essentially laid out its finding that the CIA abused detainees using quasi-scientific methods that were justified with out-there legal theories.

Of course, the powers that be took great pains to water down this investigation, first by refusing to allow any witnesses to be interviewed. Later they went so far as to break into the investigators' supposedly secure office in a CIA building in a move that was about two lawyerly briefs away from the Watergate plumbers.

Adam Driver shines as the hero of the story, Daniel Jones, and for once it's about a real guy and not some made-up Hollywood "amalgam" of people, like they usually do with movies like "Zero Dark Thirty." Jones actually has a scene where he sees an ad for that movie while he's working furiously to get the findings of his report published, and just about snorts.

"The Report" is basically an investigative whodunit in the mold of "All the President's Men," with distinct phases. It frames the ongoing work of the investigators between 2009 and 2014 with flashbacks to the actual events at the "black sites" operated by the CIA in 2002 and thereafter. The recreation of the EITs (many people call them torture) are truly stomach-churning.

In the first half, the main bad guys are a pair of quack-ish psychologists who first pushed the notion of EITs, which were based on actual rigorous training American military personnel undergo to prepare them for the possibility of being captured. This includes nasty techniques like stress positions, sleep deprivation, humiliation through slapping or forced nudity, and the now-infamous act of waterboarding, which simulates the feeling of drowning.

Played by Douglas Hodge and T. Ryder Smith, the psychologists are portrayed as cowboy amateurs, overruling experienced FBI interrogators who know how to build rapport with a subject. Instead they construct their own waterboarding table based on one they saw in a video.

Watching these detainees, evil men though they were, being so foully mistreated is gripping stuff and propels the first act of the film.

The middle section wanders a bit, as we get further away from the torture in both time and narrative, and the movie turns from the story of an investigation to the attempts to have the report made public. At one point the CIA starts investigating the people investigating them. (Yes, it really happened.)

There are surreptitious meetings with a New York Times reporter, classified documents being smuggled out of buildings, and other familiar clandestine stuff.

Annette Bening gives a strong turn as Sen. Diane Feinstein, the chair of the intelligence committee and Jones' boss. She is portrayed as diligent, un-partisan and persevering while recognizing the limitations of playing by the rules of Washington D.C., where bureaucratic processes take months, or years.

She often has to rein Jones in or yank his leash. It's interesting how their character arcs diverge. At the start, he is methodical and calm while she rages about uncovering the truth, and by the end their roles have reversed. He's hollering about the injustice of it all and she has to coldly read the facts and make the hard calls.

Aside from these two figures, this is a movie where just about everybody comes off looking bad. It is thoroughly bipartisan in its contempt -- first for the Bush administration that set EITs in motion, and later for an Obama White House that was so determined not to dwell on the past that it ended up being complicit in the cover-up.

Obama CIA director John Brennan (Ted Levine, who can scowl with the best of them), a man much in the news these days for other reasons, comes across as the main heavy in the second half of the movie as the spooks push back and try to deep-six the report.

Scott Z. Burns, a veteran screenwriter, wrote the script and directs his first feature film. It's a strong showing, taking all these different pieces and assembling them into a final puzzle. The excellent supporting cast includes Jon Hamm, Michael C. Hall, Maura Tierney, Corey Stoll, John Rothman, Scott Shepherd and Tim Blake Nelson.

Burns frequently adorns the background with honeycomb patterns or other repeating geometric shapes, like the CIA building where Jones departs from late every evening. It gives us the sense of being trapped in a beehive pervaded by a loud, droning buzz of groupthink.

Whatever your thoughts on the efficacy of enhanced interrogation, it's disturbing to think how our government undertakes execrable practices and then spend years trying to hide that fact from the public. "The Report" is a complex but worthy deep-dive into the abyss we'd rather not gaze at too long.

Review: "Angel Has Fallen"

“He knows how we do this. He knows all our tricks.”

Any spy thriller character who hangs around long enough eventually makes it to the betrayal phase. The top guy -- it’s nearly always a guy -- is set up as the stoolie for some nefarious scheme to sabotage the agency from within, and is hunted by the government.

Bond, Borne, Smiley -- it’s always the same thing. They find themselves on the run, having to outwit their own team.

You could argue that “Fallen” isn’t technically in the spy genre, since protagonist Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is a Secret Service agent, not CIA or something similar. But all the hallmarks are there: unstoppable combat skills, stubbornness bordering on mania, international plots and lots of cool technology able to do stuff straight out of, well, a movie.

I liked the first film, “Olympus Has Fallen,” well enough though the sequel, “London Has Fallen,” got tedious and not a little overly macho. All three have the same basic plot: the President’s life is threatened, and only Mike can save him. This time around it’s Allan Trumbull, played by Morgan Freeman with signature gravitas

In most movies like this, the action scenes propel you onward and the slower talkie sequences are what you must suffer through to get back to the pyrotechnics. This time around I was impressed by the “downtime” more than the parts with flying bullets.

Piper Perabo is an empathetic presence as Mike’s suffering wife, put through hell along with their baby girl when he is fingered as the culprit behind an elaborate assassination attempt on Trumball. Freeman spends most of the movie in a hospital bed, but when he was not I was reminded why it’s pleasing to have a man who is seemingly so wise and kind as POTUS.

I really was touched by Nick Nolte as Mike’s long-lost father, Clay, whom he eventually turns to when the chips are down. Clay ran out on the family a long time ago, and is stuck doing the crazy-loner-in-the-woods thing. But Nolte’s wet, pleading eyes, along with a couple of solid speeches about his motivations, genuinely hit the heart.

Quality acting in a dumb blow-em-up flick? Imagine my surprise.

The rest of the story is fairly forgettable, though it moves along at a nice clip under the direction of Ric Roman Waugh, one of the first stunt coordinators to move behind the camera. He co-wrote the screenplay with Matt Cook and Robert Mark Kamen.

Danny Huston plays Wade Jennings, an old Army buddy of Mike’s who now runs his own training facility with a hand-picked crew of mercenaries, and OMG if you don’t know where that’s going then you must not have seen Danny Huston in any movies over the past 20 years.

Seriously, Danny, get a new agent. Otherwise your first scene might as well come with a title card like the silent movies: "The villain has arrived."

Mike’s rumored to be in line for the director’s job at Secret Service, and could steer some business Wade’s way. Secretly he frets about not wanting to hang up his gun for a desk job, plus his body is breaking down after years in the field, leading to some ferocious pill-popping.

Jada Pinkett Smith plays the lead FBI agent hunting Mike; Lance Reddick is the outgoing Secret Service chief; and Tim Blake Nelson plays the nervous nelly vice president who has to take over the reins of office while the president is in a coma.

Butler is decent at the physical stuff, despite looking rather puffy and jowly these days, though the other actors have to carry him through the touchy-feely stuff.

He looks like his skin is sliding off his face and all gathering around his neck. I think the filmmakers were trying to make him look like crap, but also they went that way because that's the clay they had to work with.

Butler seems poised to take over the “Kickass Geezer” mantle that’s been passed down from Harrison Ford to Denzel Washington to Liam Neeson.

Filled with some decent action sequences and even a few well-plucked heartstrings, “Angel Has Fallen” surprises as the best of the trilogy.

Video review: "The Homesman"

If I were to measure "The Homesman" only by its two lead performances, I'd call it a home run deserving of multiple Academy Award nominations. Unfortunately, its story wanders this way and that, an open range Western that sometimes gallops, and sometimes stumbles.

Set in about 1850, the tale is of three pioneer wives who have gone mad on the lonely stretches of Nebraska. They need to be transported back to Iowa to be cared for by their families, but none of their husbands have the will or gumption to make the journey. So Mary Bee Cuddy volunteers to be their guardian and chaperone.

Mary Bee is played by Hilary Swank, in another signature performance of her career, and is a woman of immeasurable virtues. She runs her own farm and is, as one fellow says, "as good a man as any man in these parts." However, her soul is weighed down by her inability to find a husband, owing to her plain looks and bossiness.

Early in her journey she runs across George Briggs, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay. Briggs has been strung up for claim jumping, but Mary Bee cuts him down in exchange for his help getting the women back to Iowa.

Along the way they encounter the familiar array of threats from American Indians, rapacious bandits, con men and natural elements. Somehow, these two fiercely independent souls must find a way to trust one another.

Even though the script could've used a few more runs around the corral, "The Homesman" is worth a look if only to see these two master thespians plying their trade.

Bonus features are rather disappointing. The Blu-ray and DVD editions both carry the same three featurettes: "Story to Script," "Shooting the Film" and "19th Century Life."

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Review: "The Homesman"

“The Homesman” exists somewhere in that netherworld between the Western and the anti-Western. It celebrates the austerity and grit of the mid-1800s, and the people who settled west of the Mississippi River; but also casts an unsparing, gimlet eye on the brutality of those times -- and those who made it so.

It’s the sort of movie full of horses and guns and stare-downs between desperate folks, but it’s not really about those things. There is little actual violence, and that which does transpire ill comports with the uses traditionally seen in this terrain of filmmaking.

Story-wise it kind of jags this way and that, like a drunken rider upon a lame horse, neither one too sure about the navigation. But it contains a brilliant performance by Hilary Swank, full of contradictory emotions and urges that nonetheless seem perfectly confined inside a character who feels urgent and alive.

And Tommy Lee Jones, who co-stars and also directed and co-wrote the film, isn’t half-bad himself. Not to mention an impressive supporting cast that includes the likes of Meryl Streep, Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow, James Spader and Tim Blake Nelson.

Based upon a book by Glendon Swarthout, the story concerns a journey from Nebraska to Iowa roundabouts 1850 to return three wives who have gone crazy on the lonely plains to their families back East. Their husbands are reluctant to leave their crops or children to make the long, arduous journey, so Mary Bee Cuddy (Swank) steps forward.

To all outward appearances, Mary Bee is a marvel. An educated woman from New York, she runs a prosperous claim including prime farmland, stock and a tidy house. She is active in her church and community – as much as one can be when you measure the distance to neighbors in miles – and respected by all. She is, as one forthright fellow puts it, as good a man as any man in these parts.

But there is an itchy desperation to Mary Bee, driven by the fact that she is 31 years old (firmly into spinsterhood), a mite bossy and “plain as an old tin pail,” to use a variation on a common refrain. As the story opens she essentially throws herself at a callow clod with whom she has lately been social. “Why not marry?” she proposes, going on to outline the financial benefits of a pairing, and we sense this not the first time such a speech has been given.

Rejected, Mary Bee agrees to oversee three women who have been more successful in getting married, but not in what comes after. Played by Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter and Grace Gummer, each has experienced extreme tragedy that has driven them over the edge, including the death of children, due to causes natural ... and otherwise.

The trio exists as ghostly, wordless figures of pity, though Jones and his co-screenwriters (Wesley A. Oliver and Kieran Fitzgerald) are careful to show glimpses of the cruel lives that made them so.

Her charges locked into a boxed wagon, Mary Bee begins her expedition but stumbles across a man sitting on a horse with a noose around his neck. He is George Briggs (Jones), a claim-jumper and man of constant wanderings. He agrees to assist Mary Bee in exchange for saving his life, and thus begins a volatile relationship built on distrust and resentment, but also a shared sense of solitariness.

Along the way they encounter the usual sorts of challenges – Indians, rapacious cowboys, bitter snows and stomachs shriveled from hunger. The real journey is in these two damaged people venturing toward a nexus where they can both abide. It would seem impossible; she has a despairing desire to be needed, while he holds his rootless freedom as his most cherished (and often only) possession.

I wish “The Homesman” had as coherent a sense of narrative as it does well-limned portraits of its main characters. Some of the encounters in the film, particularly in the second half, have little connective tissue with the themes and story that surround them. (One, a visit to an intended town that so far has only built a hotel, tries too transparently to borrow a page from “Unforgiven.”)

But Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones are well worth the price of admission on their own. In most Westerns the actions define the character, but here it’s the words, said and unsaid, that offer a peek inside distant souls.

Review: "Kill the Messenger"

Gary Webb's career was killed not so much by the CIA as by professional jealousy. His stories, first published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, alleged that the CIA engineered, or at least willingly allowed, money from drug trafficking in the U.S. to support the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration.

These facts would be largely corroborated by subsequent government investigations. But Webb, first hailed as a journalistic hero, was systematically torn apart by the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The new film about Webb's story and its aftermath, "Kill the Messenger," portrays the editors at the big national papers as incensed that they had been scooped by a perceived inferior competitor.

If this sounds far-fetched, then you've never worked at a newspaper. They can be insular, fiercely protective enclaves, both internally and especially in dealing with rivals. When you beat them on a moderately big story, they try to ignore it -- as if the very fact that they didn't run anything about it diminishes its importance.

If you beat the other team at a really big story, the story often becomes about you. Webb found himself celebrated, then targeted, then summarily drummed out of the business. He committed suicide seven years later.

But the wider availability of information in the Internet age prompted many to follow up on his big story and legacy, including Nick Schou, who wrote the book "Kill the Messenger" upon which this movie is based, along with Webb's own tome, "Dark Alliance."

Jeremy Renner plays Webb as a prototypically normal family man, who likes to hang out with his kids and tinker with motorcycles. Except, that is, when he gets a bite of a good story -- then he becomes a Rottweiler, not just unwilling but biologically incapable of letting go.

The film, directed by Michael Cuesta from a screenplay by Peter Landesman, is firmly in Webb's corner as a righteous journalist done wrong by the powers that be. Oliver Platt and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who play his editors, practically leak air as turncoats who have their reporter's back, until they don't.

The movie similarly starts stronger and then grows fuzzy around the edges. The first half, as Webb meticulously hunts down leads, most of them from the underworld of South and Central America cocaine traffickers, shows the drudgery of investigative journalism, sparked by occasional electricity when connections are made.

The second half gets a little repetitive and dreary, as the backlash against Webb grows, reputedly inspired by a concerted effort by the CIA itself. Shadowy figures start hanging out around Webb's home, and mute men in suits paw through his papers without even a by-your-leave.

The relationship between Webb and his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) follows the traditional line in these sorts of movies, where the loving, understanding spouse grows concerned about how invested their partner is in their work, pushes back, and eventually dire choices must be made. They seem to fall in and out of love in just a few ticks on the clock.

The good outweighs the bad in "Kill the Messenger," but like Webb's reporting -- prone to exaggeration and theatricality, but essentially true -- it tries too hard at embellishing a good tale that needed no help.