A sculptor preparing to open a new show tries to work amidst the daily dramas of family and friends.

Certain Women drops us into a handful of intersecting lives across Montana. A lawyer ( ) tries to defuse a hostage situation and calm her disgruntled client ( ), who feels slighted by a workers' compensation settlement. A married couple ( and ) breaks ground on a new home but exposes marital fissures when they try to persuade an elderly man to sell his stockpile of sandstone. A ranch hand ( ) forms an attachment to a young lawyer ( ), who inadvertently finds herself teaching a twice-weekly...

The year is 1845, the earliest days of the Oregon Trail, and a wagon team of three families has hired the mountain man Stephen Meek to guide them over the Cascade Mountains. Claiming to know a short cut, Meek leads the group on an unmarked path across the high plain desert, only to become lost in the dry rock and sage. Over the coming days, the emigrants must face the scourges of hunger, thirst and their own lack of faith in each other's instincts for survival. When a Native American wanderer...