A Thousand Acres (1997)
Runtime: 1 hr 45 mins
Synopsis: A THOUSAND ACRES, director Jocelyn Moorhouse's screen adaptation of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, finds skeins of KING LEAR-like conflict running through the bedrock of a midwestern family. Jason Robards stars as Larry Cook, a powerful, stoic Iowa farmer who decides to... A THOUSAND ACRES, director Jocelyn Moorhouse's screen adaptation of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, finds skeins of KING LEAR-like conflict running through the bedrock of a midwestern family. Jason Robards stars as Larry Cook, a powerful, stoic Iowa farmer who decides to retire and split his 1000 acres of land among his three daughters. His two eldest daughters, Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Ginny (Jessica Lange), live and work on the farm and happily accept the lucrative agreement, while the youngest, Larry's favorite, Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), has abandoned farming life for a law career in Des Moines and refuses to take part in the deal. Initially, Larry is consumed with rage and shuts out Caroline while Rose and Ginny go about running the farm with their dutiful but greedy husbands. However, as Larry begins to lose touch with his farming life, he loses touch with reality, and his painful descent into madness leaves him bitterly opposed to his daughters' ways of running the farm. Paranoid and disillusioned, he decides to sue Rose and Ginny with Caroline's help in an effort to regain his patriarchal control. The lawsuit divides the family forever, leaving Rose and Ginny to suffer alone while realizing painful memories from their childhood. As Rose and Ginny discover their own individual strengths in the face of adversity, they learn how to survive on their own, without the protection of the farm and the suffocating presence of their father. Moorhouse's film is an epic tale of loss and redemption that highlights strong and earthy performances from Pfeiffer and Lange. [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jason Robards, Colin Firth
DVD Info
Release:
Sep 3, 2002
DVD Features:
- Region 1
- Keep Case
- Letterboxed - 1.85
Audio:
- Dolby Digital 5.1 - English
Additional Release Material:
- Trailers
Interactive Features:
- Scene Access
- Interactive Menus
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
From the first frame, a silhouetted barn and windmill at dawn, the images feel prefab, and the all-purpose wistful tinkly piano and sighing strings pin them even more boringly down.
All the characters are sharply defined, with Lange and Pfeiffer in fine form, and Robards suitably sour as the grumpy old curmudgeon, but the plot has been watered down until it is little more than a Waltons-styled soap.
Proof that Hollywood no longer knows how to make that former staple, the women's picture.
Owing more to the spirit of Oprah than to the Bard, pic serves up an earnest but unconvincing stew of received notions about family dysfunction, awkwardly put across by a script wheezing with melodramatic contrivances.
The story is just an empty, manipulative compilation of tragedies and misunderstandings.
In many ways, it has less in common with Shakespeare's tragedy than with Stephen King's Iowa-set horror story, Children of the Corn.
Robards' senile paterfamilias is, regrettably, a grave embarrassment.
It's a pretty powerful analysis of an extended family (where lifelong friends in farming are integral to the well being of a community) shot apart by power and greed.
Fans of Jane Smiley's enthralling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, will find the movie version disappointing.
You'll be shocked to discover how much of the novel's richness has been lost.
Pfeiffer excepted, the filmmakers reap little from the rich soil they have been handed.
It's worth overlooking the movie's weaknesses for the sake of those strong, memorable performances from the stars.

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