A Thousand Acres

Released September 1997

Starring Jessica Lange (as Ginny Cook Smith), Michelle Pfeiffer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jason Robards, Colin Firth, Keith Carradine, Kevin Anderson, Pat Hingle
Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse
105 min.

Box Office gross - $7.9 million

See complete credits at Internet Movie Database

Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Thousand Acres tells the story of the Cross family, whose aging patriarch has decided to divide his vast acreage among his three daughters. This announcement causes turmoil among the daughters as dark secrets and family skeletons come to the surface. It is a modern day adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, played out on an Iowa farm.

Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer had long wanted to work together and this project appealed to them - a literate emotional story with strong central female characters. It would also be directed by a woman - Australia’ s Jocelyn Moorhouse. The lengthy novel was adapted by Laura Jones and whittling the book down for a screen adaptation was no easy task. Many fans of the book were disappointed with the film because many of the subplots and characters had to be left out for time considerations.

Lange herself was disappointed with the end result. She said "I had a tremendous disappointment in the film--not in working with Michelle, or in the work that we did, but in what's finally up on the screen, which is not at all what I had hoped the film would be. The thing is, we had the wrong director. She didn't make the film that needed to be made. There's no blame there, you can't blame anybody but yourself, because ultimately you were in on the decision to hire this particular person. We made a huge mistake, and you pay the consequences of this."

Lange and Pfeiffer are excellent in the film. Lange, especially, is amazing in this role. Her delicate mannerisms and hand gestures are used to great advantage here. Her scenes with Pfeiffer’s children in the ending scenes are especially poignant.

Critical Sampling:

"Lange captures Ginny's bewildered, sweet, resilient-yet-already-defeated personality in a wonderfully nuanced performance. Few other actors are able to convey simultaneous levels of knowing and feeling like Lange. Like an archaeologist digging through layers of deception, she reveals Ginny's increasing self-awareness -- while refusing to make that self-awareness redemptive. There's a slow tough-mindedness to Lange's Ginny that is perfectly Midwestern. Gary Karniya, Salon.com

...the performance that almost holds the movie together comes from Lange, who turns this family crisis into a credible midlife crisis for her character, who at first is willing to suppress everything to make her farm run smoothly. As her life gradually turns into a nonstop series of dashed hopes, Lange makes Ginny's decision to make a clean break seem quite inevitable. - John Hartl, Film.com

 

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