Riders on the Storm
by Kristian Lin
I haven't read Jane Smiley's novel "A Thousand Acres," but the movie has pretty much scared me off. The story attempts to turn a variation on "King Lear," where powerful Iowa farmer Larry Cook (Jason Robards) decides to divide his estate among his three daughters Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The youngest dissents and is exiled from the family, and then family tensions drive the remaining members apart. The twist is that Larry sexually molested Ginny and Rose as girls, and he, not his eldest daughters, is the movie's monster.
I guess the best thing about this movie is the rapport between Lange and Pfeiffer. Ginny is virtue under siege, while Rose (who, unlike Ginny, remembers her father's sexual abuse) is full of poorly repressed rage. The actresses have played these characters before and better ("Rob Roy" and "Batman Returns," for instance), but they seem happy to be working together. The chemistry between them and their obvious dedication to this project give the film its low level of interest.
Other than that, Robards overplays the patriarch going insane. If you're a fan of Jennifer Jason Leigh (like me), you'll be really frustrated at the way her character is given no arc. The dialogue is flat, the men in Ginny and Rose's lives are ciphers, and Rose's daughters are hardly there at all. Jocelyn Moorhouse's filmmaking is static; long conversations have the feel of a tepid evening at the theater. Cliches abound; lightning streaks at dramatic moments, a deathbed scene, a courtroom scene. Hollywood has turned out great "women's pictures" (a categorization I disapprove of), but Moorhouse is the worst director in this genre. When they're done like this, touchy-feely dramas are no improvement on Hollywood's usual testosterone-laced fare.
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