A THOUSAND ACRES (Touchstone) Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jason Robards, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Colin Firth, Keith Carradine, Kevin Anderson. Screenplay: Laura Jones, based on the novel by Jane Smiley. Producers: Marc Abraham, Steve Golin, Lynn Arost, Kaaate Guinzburg and Sigurjon Sighvatsson. Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, brief nudity) Running Time: 104 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
All right, let's get this out of the way: A THOUSAND ACRES is "King Lear" on the farm. It's the story of an aging farmer named Larry Cook (Jason Robards) who decides to retire and divide his massive Iowa spread between his daughters Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Caroline expresses some doubts, however, prompting an enraged Larry to cut her out of the deal. That leaves Ginny and Rose and their hubands running the farm, but it also leaves Larry on a slow train towards madness. One massive external-storm-reflecting-internal-turmoil later, the entire family is caught up in a complex web of bitterness and long-buried secrets.
No one involved is pretending A THOUSAND ACRES _isn't_ a gloss on "Lear." The front cover flap of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 novel flatly proclaims it, and the film's production notes explain the connection in detail. But that didn't have to be all there was to the film. There was certainly plenty more to Smiley's novel, an engrossing tale filled with lyrical prose and finely-observed details about the daily routines of farm life. That sense of a specific place, as well as the specific time of malaise-era 1979, gave the novel a distinctive feel which transcended the familiarity of the basic plot elements.
Director Jocelyn Moorhouse's rendering of the story, on the other hand, never quite stakes out its own territory. Sure, it retains Smiley's unique sympathy for the daughers -- her angle suggests Lear deserved everything he got, and then some -- as well as the strong sibling relationship. Both Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer turn in strong performances, particularly Lange as the placid, unquestioning Ginny. Yet even their relationship can't hold A THOUSAND ACRES together once Laura Jones' script starts racing from melodramatic plot point to melodramatic plot point, as though capturing every sordid detail would result in capturing the essence of the material. Without the poetry and perspective of Smiley's language, the story becomes little more than a collection of tragedies -- Shakespeare without the wisdom or the words. It's like something out of a pitch meeting from THE PLAYER: "It's King Lear, but it's funny, and sad, and with breast cancer, adultery, domestic violence, alcoholism and child abuse."
Actually, not exactly sad, and not at all funny. A THOUSAND ACRES is a terribly grim film experience, filled with bitter and unhappy people who become more bitter and unhappy with each passing day. Even when the film turns to pathos, it never allows the audience an emotional catharsis because no one seems eager to reach a resolution. Meanwhile the only laughs are of the gallows variety, mostly connected to realizations that characters have suffered yet another humiliation, with a dash of mixed Shakespearean metaphor (a reference to THE MERCHANT OF VENICE's "pound of flesh") thrown in for good measure.
Talented cinematographer Tak Fujimoto does his best to capture Smiley's Iowa landscapes visually, but his is an effort doomed to failure. Smiley was able to turn the land into a charater in her novel, perhaps its most important character. It's a character Shakespeare didn't come up with, and it's one of the things which gave A THOUSAND ACRES its own personality and resonance on the page. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have such a disappointing adaption.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 serpent's teeth: 4.
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