A Thousand Acres: Critic Reviews

Think obsessive-compulsive Lady Macbeth or Ophelia with an eating disorder, and you have an idea of just how simplistic that seems.

It's a mess, though one inevitably worth seeing by curious readers or fans of the cast who just won't be deterred.

In many ways, it has less in common with Shakespeare's tragedy than with Stephen King's Iowa-set horror story, Children of the Corn.

That Jane Smileya(TM)s A Thousand Acres would become a movie was inevitable. Another virtual certainty was its bowdlerization.

The film substitutes prejudices for ideas, formula feminism for character studies, and a signposted plot for a well-told story.

The story is just an empty, manipulative compilation of tragedies and misunderstandings.

Owing more to the spirit of Oprah than to the Bard, pic serves up an earnest but unconvincing stew of received notions about family dysfunction, awkwardly put across by a script wheezing with melodramatic contrivances.

Ploddingly literal, A Thousand Acres is basically a star vehicle that relies on superior acting to redeem it. It does have superior acting, but that's not nearly enough.

From the first frame, a silhouetted barn and windmill at dawn, the images feel prefab, and the all-purpose wistful tinkly piano and sighing strings pin them even more boringly down.

Although the plot is undeniably overwrought at times, the characters remain strong and reliable, and it's their believability that pulls us through.

Cry, cry, cry. Hug, hug, hug. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

All the characters are sharply defined, with Lange and Pfeiffer in fine form, and Robards suitably sour as the grumpy old curmudgeon, but the plot has been watered down until it is little more than a Waltons-styled soap.

Proof that Hollywood no longer knows how to make that former staple, the women's picture.

Robards' senile paterfamilias is, regrettably, a grave embarrassment.

It's a pretty powerful analysis of an extended family (where lifelong friends in farming are integral to the well being of a community) shot apart by power and greed.

... just doesn't work.

Fans of Jane Smiley's enthralling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, will find the movie version disappointing.