SPOILER ALERT (don't read if you've not seen)

Once more: don't read the following if you have not seen this title...

I've seen the debates most posters here have had, about Gere's character's identity. And I would say the majority of you are correct. I could be wrong, but this is how I took it...I'll put it best I can: He was Horace Townsend, not Jack Sommersby. The body he was burying under the rocks in the beginning was that of Sommersby. The real Sommersby. He then made his way to Sommersby town, and home. Of course, Laura (Jodie Foster), and the whole town is suspicious of him, believing him not Sommersby, just a man who looks like him, and they're right. However, Sommersby is remembered as a horrible, abusive, racist man. Laura never really loved him. She was miserable during her marriage to him. She however, finds herself falling in love with this man, seeing as he is a far better man than Sommersby was. He is gentle, compassionate, good-hearted deep down. Even though she knows it's not the man she married, in her eyes (and in the town's eyes), and in her mind, she looks at it this way: that Sommersby is finally the ideal husband and father she wished he would be. Even if it's not actually the same man (the only thing he has in common with the real Sommersby is looking physically identical to him), he is what the real Sommersby should have been. The man Laura had always dreamed/hoped he could be. That's why she's happy this time to calll him her husband. Just as the courtroom scene clearly makes this point, when she says, "You are not Jack Sommersby!" "How do you know I'm not?" "I know because I never loved him the way I love you." And then he asks, "From your heart, am I your husband, or not?" "Yes." Within the idiosyncracies used along the parallels of, say...Starman, Regarding Henry...the wives of those characters also fell in love with something, or someone who looked like their husbands, only in physical form. As in the former, a widow fell in love with a peace-loving alien who was a better person than her husband had been...and in the latter, Regarding Henry, that wife fell in love with a gentle, childlike man who emerged in her husband's body; her husband before his injury had been a horrible man. Another example is "The Man In the Iron Mask." The Three Musketeers took a prisoner from the Bastille named Phillippe, for the purpose of switching him with the king, a vicious, selfish, wicked person, who didn't deserve to rule. Phillippe was a loving, gentle, compassionate, wiser man, and was a far more fit king.

Anyway...

And Sommersby was accused of murder. It's true, he did kill that man. At least the real Sommersby did. But Horace Townsend was no murderer. He was a con artist and liar maybe, according to that one witness on the stand...but when he arrived at the town and home of the real Sommersby, he fell in love with Laura for real. And was willing to atone and go straight for swindling people. He could have told the truth and admitted he was Horace Townsend, but he decided to claim to be Sommersby and allow the murder charges to stand against him, and be executed as Sommersby, because, he cared more for Laura and the children's lives and dignity than his own. If he didn't...if he chose to be identified as Townsend, then the town would brand Laura, for the rest of her life, an adultress, and their newborn daughter a bastard child. He wanted to spare them that indignity. He also chose to be identified as Sommersby because in Laura's heart and mind, Sommersby had finally become the man she always hoped he would be. He was sacrificing his life for their dignity.