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USA 1997
Directed by
Jocelyn Moorhouse
105 minutes
Rated MA

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

Thousand Acres, A

What works in the theatrically-heightened context of Shakespeare's King Lear or Akira Kurosawa’s transposition of it to feudal Japan in Ran does not necessarily work when re-jigged to fit modern Mid-west America and a feminist agenda.

Based on Jane Smiley's best-selling novel about an aging farmer, Larry Cook (Jason Robards), and his three daughters, Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the Shakespearean saga of an old man’s folly is embellished with a romantic sub-plot involving the errant son of a neighbouring farmer, Jess (Colin Firth) and various marital problems involving Rose's and Ginny's husbands (Peter (Kevin Anderson) and Ty (Keith Carradine).

As she did with her previous film, How To Make An American Quilt, Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse proves herself adept with the language of cinematic Americana, this time mixing soap-opera-ish women’s  issues (breast cancer, sexual abuse, infertility to name just the most prominent) with picturesque farm-belt values (she even uses a storm in both films as a symbol of the "winds of change).. But although she has juicier material to work with here dramatically it is not well motivated or shaped and it ends up, like the earlier film, seeming formulaic..

How much of the problem was in the script by Jane Campion-regular, Laura Jones, and how much in the editing (apparently Moorhouse was so displeased by the first cut she tried to have her name removed) it is not easy to say but the most insistent problem is with the key initiatory disinheritance of the Caroline/Cordelia character by Larry/Lear.  Inexplicably Larry turns on his daughter because she does not wholeheartedly back his decision to split the family farm between her and her sisters.  As a catalyst it comes out of nowhere but it is only the prominent instance of the film’s many axes of conflict which seem stitched together rather than driven by the dynamics of the situation. Caroline, rather oddly given the story's source, ending up as a dupe if not an outright villain relative to her two older sisters who have been updated to be more sympathetic characters Firth’s Jess is moved around like a dummy to provide some sexually-disruptive spice ("why Firth?" one asks when so many American actors could have easily filled the role), Carradine’s Ty seems to have no clear characterization whatsoever and Anderson’s Peter is equally vaguely drawn (so muchg so that when he dies Rose, understandably, seems unaffected)

Lange, of course, has long played country women fighting to survive in a man’s world and she obliges with a characteristically emotive performance here but it is Pfeiffer who stands out as the steely Rose, the harbourer of a dark family secret. Whilst the usually spiky Leigh demurely drifts in and out of the story, the men, with the exception of Robards have little to do but hover like moths around the female cast’s flame.  For all its failures, however, A Thousand Acres is worth it for Lange and Pfeiffer, the latter an uncredited producer who had long nursed the project.

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