A Thousand Acres (1997)

Absolutely Fantastic

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

This just in, folks: Women (all, no matter how depraved) are good; men (all, no matter how virtuous) are bad.Meat- eaters bad, vegetarians good.The ONLY reason I didn't rate it one star is the somewhat decent performances by Pfeiffer and Lange.Talk about Hollywood trashing the heartland - as it is so fond of doing.The producers and directors should collectively be hanged. What more does IMDb require to write a review?

Having watched this film years ago, it never faded from my memory. I always thought this was the finest performance by Michelle Pfeiffer that I've seen. But, I am astounded by the number of negative reviews that this film has received. After seeing it once more today, I still think it is powerful, moving and couldn't care less if it is "based loosely on King Lear".I now realize that this is the greatest performance by Jessica Lange that I've ever seen - and she has had accolades for much shallower efforts.A Thousand Acres is complex, human, vibrant and immensely moving, but surely doesn't present either of the primary female leads with any touch of glamour or "sexiness". I don't think this is well received in these times.Perhaps one reason for this film's underwhelming response lies in the fact that the writer (Jane Smiley(, screenplay (Laura Jones), and director (Jocelhyn Moorehouse) are all women. I know that, in my younger days, I wouldn't have read a book written by a woman. I didn't focus on this fact until years later.If you haven't seen this movie or gave it a chance in the past, try watching it anew. Maybe you are ready for it.

The story is derived from "King Lear"; the setting is a farm in Iowa. Here's a test for this kind of thing: if you find yourself asking, "Why did so-and-so do such-and-such," and the answer is, "because that's what happened in 'King Lear'," you know that the film has failed. Well, that IS what happens here. The father figure in this story isn't living his own life, he's mimicking a fictional one. But there's more wrong with the film than this.Jocelyn Moorhouse is ambitious - far more ambitious than I think she realises. She's trying to take the King Lear story and completely change the setting. This is a task in itself. The likeliest result is that the transplanted story will die, and nobody will quite be able to work out why (although there are enough successful transplants, like "West Side Story", to make it worth trying). But she's ALSO attempting a revisionist retelling. In the version of "King Lear" she wishes to create, Reagan and Goneril command our sympathy, and Cordelia is a villain. This is a task in itself, too.Succeeding at either task is hard; succeeding at both at once is impossible. In fact, succeeding at one while so much as attempting the other, is impossible. If we are to look on the very same events from a different moral perspective then the events must BE the very same events - which means there can be no tampering with setting. If the story is to be transplanted, alive, into a different setting, its moral heart must keep beating the whole while - which means there can be no tampering with ethical perspective. Moorhouse was bound to fail in not just one but in both of her endeavours. And so she did. ...Naturally, it's possible to attempt both tasks, fail at both tasks, yet by some fluke hit upon a work of art that's good for independent reasons. I mention this because I haven't read Jane Smiley's novel, which, for all I know, IS good for independent reasons. But the film isn't. If there was nothing else wrong with it, there would still be no getting around the fact that it's just so thoroughly, excruciatingly DULL. The very fields of corn are even more boring than they would be in real life - which needn't be the case, since off the top of my head I can think of four films ("The Wizard of Oz", "North by Northwest", "The Straight Story", "Kikujiro") in which the cornfields aren't boring at all.

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.