A Thousand Acres is a 1997 American drama directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Robards.
This is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Jane Smiley, which is reworking William Shakespeare King Lear . Larry Cook's character matches the character of the drama's title, while the characters Ginny, Rose and Caroline represent Lear's daughter, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. The dramatic catalyst in both of them is the division of father's treasures among his three sons, causing fierce competition and ultimately leading to tragedy.
Video A Thousand Acres (film)
Plot
Larry Cook (Jason Robards), a prosperous Iowa farmer, decided to retire and divide his vast land between his three daughters, Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Ginny and Rose gladly accepted the lucrative treaty to live and work on the farm, but Caroline left the farm for a career in Des Moines and refused to take part in the deal.
Larry is consumed with anger and refuses Caroline, leaving Rose and Ginny to go about running the farm with their husbands (Keith Carradine and Kevin Anderson). However, since Larry lost contact with farming life, he began to lose touch with reality, and his reduction of pain into dementia made him strongly against the way his daughter runs the farm.
As he struggles to defend the farm, Ginny finds a rift in relation to Rose, who reveals that Larry has been sexually abusing when he was a child, and insists that he has done the same to Ginny. The two women also developed a strong extra-marital bond with Jess (Colin Firth), the handsome son of a neighboring farmer loyal to Larry.
Paranoid and disappointed, Larry decides to sue Rose and Ginny in an attempt to regain control of the patriarchy, and seeks the help of Caroline. The lawsuit divides the family forever, leaving Rose and Ginny to suffer alone while realizing the painful truth about their childhood. When Rose and Ginny discover their own individual strengths in the face of adversity, they learn to survive on their own, without farm protection and the presence of their choking father.
Maps A Thousand Acres (film)
Cast
- Michelle Pfeiffer as Rose Cook Lewis
- Jessica Lange as Ginny Cook Smith
- Jason Robards as Larry Cook
- Jennifer Jason Leigh as Caroline Cook
- Colin Firth as Jess Clark
- Keith Carradine as Ty Smith
- Kevin Anderson as Peter Lewis
- Pat Hingle as Harold Clark
- John Carroll Lynch as Ken LaSalle
- Anne Pitoniak as Mary Livingstone
- Vyto Ruginis as Charles Carter
- Michelle Williams as Pammy
- Elisabeth Moss as Linda
- Ray Toler as Marv Carson
- Kenneth Tigar as Doctor
- Steve Key as Loren Clark
- And Conway as Henry Dodge
- Stan Cahill as Frank
- Ray Baker as Wallace Crockett
- Beth Grant as Roberta Andrea Nittoli as a Servant
Reception
A Thousand Hectares currently holds a 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, shows a very negative critical acceptance.
Janet Maslin in the New York Times wrote: "Although Michelle Pfeiffer delivered an impressive cold rage as a regal story version of Regan (now a hard hearted breast cancer patient called Rose), and Jessica Lange worked hard to breathe out into Goneril (called Ginny), the film remains rigid and inconclusive... Think of obsessive-compulsive or Ophelia's Lady Macbeth with eating disorders, and you have an idea of ​​how simple it is. "
Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: " A Thousand Hectares is an unflappable and undigested association of 'women's issues', milling about in a half-baked retread of King Lear. The movie is so out of focus that at the end of a very long 104 minutes, I can not say who I should like and which I should hate - although I can name some characters for whom I am the same once have no feelings... This scenario is based on a novel by Jane Smiley, unread to me, who won the Pulitzer Prize - which means that the novel or prize has done a great injustice. "
Desson Howe at Washington Post wrote: "That Jane Smiley's A Thousand of Hectares will be the inevitable movie Another virtual assurance is his bowdlerization... Without the Smiley submission process (though we are subjected to a long narrative), there is nothing left except melodrama... If there is a positive thing that needs to be demonstrated, it will be a Lange show.A emotional battle to avoid the harsh reality will surely make it for great rewards-that time. he made a joke in an empty drama that - with all its narrative ellipses - should be called 'A Hundred Acres'.
Godfrey Cheshire in Variety writes: "Considering that Moorhouse made one of Australia's best directorial debuts in the last decade with Proof, a small film with great precision and insight, it's a shame that with this film and the How to Make the American Blanket he seems to have surrendered himself to America's big, broad-stroke budget world, where his skills are still clear but feels diluted.It is also regrettable that he is able to make very little use here from Leigh and Robards, who are as good as they can be in a no-take role. Lange and Pfeiffer are well-suited and generally better, though they are also limited by lackluster writing.The film's prominent perfume, meanwhile, comes from Keith Carradine, which is relatively small from Ginny's husband and managed to give her a degree of shading and dignity-for-despair. "
Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "Imagine.This is a great, blond, beautiful, workforce, colliding and binding and going to the throat. Scenes that could have been written. once, that the Thousand Hectares, the film version of Jane Smiley novel of the same name, should be a soap opera Do not blame the actors, the successful attempt at keeping the bad news from the audience for almost half the picture. ever more fierce and committed, and just looking at Leigh and Lange in the same frame is satisfying... This is a picture that is guaranteed to inspire a kind of schizophrenic reaction to the viewers: They'll wish it better, but keep it happy it's made. "
Rita Kempley at the Washington Post wrote: "Jane Smiley's novel A Thousand Acres has been called" King Lear in the cornfield, "but vigorously Adaptation the long-awaited screen is the skeletal lithium of miscarriage, mastectomy, sexual harassment, public humiliation and personal betrayal.In many ways, it has little in common with the Shakespeare tragedy than with the Iowa King horror story arranged by Stephen King, Children of the Corn ... Of course, the film adaptation definitely requires some simplification, but screenwriter Laura Jones, a New Zealander who also wrote three Jane Campion films, all but exorcised the novel spirit while she uses a lot from Smiley dialogue verbatim and including some beautiful prose in Jessica Lange's narrative, meditation on the erosion of family farming and the patriarchy that sustains it has been translated into feminist work. "
Time Out wrote: "Jane Smiley's novel gets points for chutzpah, but Jocelyn Moorhouse's adaptation makes the bad weather of King Lear lately.Regardless of the relaxed style of Waltons voice, Larry Cook and his relatives are not as convincing as the dynasty Midwestern farms, while the movie itself has only a beautiful soil taste, it makes the rocky terrain the next melodramatic basis. "
Awards and nominations
Jessica Lange was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Drama Drama, but lost to Judi Dench at Mrs. Chocolate
See also
- List of William Shakespeare screen adaptations
References
External links
- Thousand Hectares on IMDb
- A Thousand Hectares at Box Office Mojo
- A Thousand Hectares at Rotten Tomatoes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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