A Thousand Acres movie review (1997)
Among the other subjects dutifully ticked off are a husband's rejection of his wife after she has a mastectomy; a woman who has five miscarriages because no one told her the local drinking water was poisoned with pesticides; the alcoholism of the father and one of the husbands; the inadequate sexual performance of both husbands; the betrayal of Rose and Ginny by a handsome neighbor man (Colin Firth), who is such a cad he sleeps with both of them, but only tells one about the other, and a man who buys a tractor that is three times bigger than he needs--a clear case of phallic compensation. Toward the end we get the tragedy of Alzheimer's, the heartlessness of banks, the problem of unnecessary lawsuits and the obligatory "giant agricultural conglomerate.'' All of these subjects are valid and promising and could be well handled in a better movie. In "A Thousand Acres,'' alas, they seem like items on a checklist. The movie is so distracted by both the issues and the "Lear'' parallels that the characters bolt from one knee-jerk situation to the next.
Then there is the problem of where to place our sympathy. In "King Lear," of course, we love Lear and his daughter Cordelia, and hate the two older sisters and their husbands. In "A Thousand Acres," it cannot be permitted for a man to be loved or a woman to be hated, and so we have the curious spectacle of the two older sisters being portrayed as somehow favorably unfavorable, while the youngest, by eventually siding with her father, becomes a study in tortured plotting: She is good because she's a woman, suspect because she's a lawyer, bad because she sues the others, forgiven because her father evolves from monstrous to merely pathetic.
Many of the closing scenes are set in a courtroom, providing the curious experience of a movie legal case in which the audience neither understands the issues nor cares which side wins.
The movie is narrated by Ginny, the Lange character, apparently in an effort to impose a point of view where none exists. But why Ginny? Is she better than the others? At the end of the film she intones, in a solemn voiceover, "I've often thought that the death of a parent is the one misfortune for which there is no compensation." Say what? She doesn't remember her mother and is more than reconciled to the death of a father who (thanks to recovered memory) she now knows molested her. What compensation could she hope for, short of stealing him from his deathbed to hang him on a gallows? "A Thousand Acres" is so misconceived, it should almost be seen just to appreciate the winding road it travels through sexual politics. Many of the individual scenes are well acted (Pfeiffer and Lange are luminous in their three most important scenes together).
But the film substitutes prejudices for ideas, formula feminism for character studies, and a signposted plot for a well-told story. The screenplay is based on a novel by Jane Smiley, unread by me, which won the Pulitzer Prize - which means that either the novel or the prize has been done a great injustice.
