A Thousand Acres (1997)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

just watch it!

Awesome Movie

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

I watched this movie, having never read the book, and took the characters at face value, but having already been introduced to them, watched it again recently. I got a whole different viewpoint out of the film.Without the burden of having to focus intently on each character, learning their quirks and foibles, allowed me to focus on the cultural issues laid out in the film. The farm families of Iowa are so intimately inter-related as they are in the area of Indiana where I grew up in the 40's and 50's that I immediately recognized the back-stories and motives behind the characters. Perhaps, Jane Smiley did mean for us to see beyond the superficial into the world these people had to live, but viewers are so caught up in the "Hollywood" aura of the individual actors that they miss a rich layout of a lifestyle that exists less and less as each decade passes. Another film with these characteristics is the "Bridges of Madison County". Try watching both of these films again with an eye to the whole picture.

**** Possible Spoiler **** If you were making a serious movie involving a powerful, but aging father with three apparently ungrateful daughters, featuring actors of the highest caliber, with great cinematography and a beautiful Midwestern setting, now where would you go with it? Why, you'd fashion a modern tragedy after "King Lear" of course.That's what I was expecting. That certainly wasn't what I got. What I got was 105 minutes of feminist tripe--one long harangue about man's inhumanity to woman. Why, there wasn't a decent male in the entire story. You see early on where this film might be headed, but you can't believe anyone would waste all these fine actors and craftsmen on that trite scenario--you just want them to get on with the King Lear theme. But it never happens; and there's the real tragedy if you ask me.Aside from the panorama of glorious rural heartland, about the only thing worth watching in this film was that wonderful chameleon, British actor Colin Firth, practicing his Midwestern accent. Now there was a treat.3/10

Spoilers herein.This is a not incompetent soap opera. And Michelle is uncharacteristically competent. But it is an antiLear -- don't be fooled by the superficial similarity of three daughters and a will.The play has Lear as an innocent pawn of his own vision. The play is about vision and naming, and demons manipulating reality through the audience. It is immensely sophisticated.This drek is merely a play about a bad man. Nothing sophisticated at all.

Given the way the film begins - lots of slow tracking shots of the thousand acres - I expected this to be a dull but worthy effort only brightened by Michelle Pfeiffer (the reason I bought the tape). To an extent this was true - Pfeiffer's character was by far the most interesting. Her anger throughout, although utterly justified, carried an air of self-destruction and manipulation that made the story most watchable. There were points when I wondered if the film was going to miss any tragedian tricks (perhaps I mean soap opera headlines: death, abandonment, loss with no true deliverance, etc), but it was the believability of Pfeiffer and the ugly familiness achieved by the rest of the cast that carried it, showing peaks of humanity through the weight of the film's atmosphere.