A Woman's a Helluva Thing

Houston Blackett (Angus Macfadyen) publishes a men's magazine, treats women as conquests and has spent years keeping his distance from the family ranch in Colorado. His mother's death drags him home for the reading of the will, where he learns she has named as executor of her estate the one woman who ever slipped away from him: Zane Douglas (Penelope Ann Miller). The deeper surprise is that Zane was his mother's partner, a secret lesbian relationship the whole town seems to have understood better than he did. Sharing the ranch with the woman who loved his mother forces Houston to reconsider everything he assumed about desire, family and his own swaggering self-image. Ann-Margret and Mary Kay Place round out the cast of writer-director Karen Leigh Hopkins's romantic comedy, a Here original that premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2001 and closed Washington's Reel Affirmations festival the following year.