"Theres malignancy on every page" - David E. Kelley upon reading the script for "A Thousand Acres" (Kelley is also known as Mr. Michelle Pfieffer)

Complex, rich, expansive and emotional, "A Thousand Acres" must be an extremely grand and rewarding novel. This is also true of the film based upon it. It encompasses so much feeling deriving from so many emotional layers that it soon envelops us in the lives of it's rich characters.

The film opens with scenes of beautiful Midwestern farm countryside (shot by Tak Fujimoto) accentuated by Jessica Lange's sparse narration. These airy and ample landscapes act as a backdrop for the drama which is about to unfold. Since land is the basis of the theme of the plot, it is important that we see the land, feel it, understand it, know it. Having grown up in the Midwest, I can tell you that the scenes here are much like being there. They set us into the film. Lange's character's voice seems as spacious as these landscapes and we soon see most of what happens through her character, Ginny's eyes.

The plot that develops is spurred by a decision her father, played by Jason Robards, makes to split his farmland, the titular "thousand acres," between his three daughters. After we meet the sisters, and the film begins to proceed, we see their types coming into focus. Ginny is the slightly naive and rather sweet oldest. Michelle Pfieffer is the bitter middle child and Jennifer Jason Leigh is the youngest and more profession sister. She has moved to Des Moines and, having left the farm, has become a lawyer.

While Lange's Ginny narrates the film, and grows the most as a person throughout it's proceedings, Pfieffer's character is really the richest voice here. Harsh and articulate, she is also a cancer victim. Director Jocelyn Moorhouse wisely shows us Pfieffer's character Rose's battlescars at films start. She does this in a shocking scene where we witness a visit to the doctor's office where he examines Rose's torso after a mastectomy. To see the usually pretty Pfieffer here, shirt raised, with one breast and one scar jolts us with it's brutal reality. Then it softens us to Rose. It makes us see her as a sayer of the truth and a "real" person. We cannot help but like her.

Of course, these two actresses really make the film. They are fortunate to have a wondrous script by Laura Jones based on Jane Smiley's 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning novel. They make the characters so alive, so rich, so intricate, that we are immediately drawn into the expanse of the film. These are women who deserve reward and acclaim for their lives, as do the actresses who portray them. Lange has her greatest role ever. And Pfieffer once again proves, as she did in "Frankie and Johnny," that she is at her best when she subdues her physical beauty and plays a "normal," if you will, person. By casting her as Rose, we see her character's inward beauty rising and overflowing out of Pfieffer's facade. It's magical.

The rest of the cast have to play background to these two women but each works a particular thread into the fabric of the film that helps us understand the plot as well as the two leads and draws us further into their story. Robards tackles a difficult role head on and delivers the best character he's played in years. Leigh opens up a whole new area in her career playing a somewhat misguided woman whom, it seems, we should dislike. Yet her ability to make us see this character's faults and weaknesses as nothing more than an inability to understand the whole scope of her sister's lives is truly unique. Meanwhile Kevin Anderson, Keith Carradine and Colin Firth play the men in the sister's lives, other than their father. Each has an ability to lend a different and distinctive yet subdued voice to the proceedings. Anderson's weakness plays off Pfieffer's strength while Carradine's naivety reminds us how much Lange's Ginny is changing and evolving, growing. Meanwhile, Colin Firth and Pat Hingle represent different men, at odds with these women, unable to either appreciate or truly understand them. Mainly, like Robards, they are unable to truly offer the women anything of real value.

Lange's character's emotional growth is astounding and intriguing to watch. Her finest moment comes towards the film's end when she has left the farm and moved on with her life. When a character from her past visits her, she makes a statement that truly shows how much she has changed. In a moment of revelation to us and her former friend she delivers an almost Vonnegutian line about her past self. "I was a ninny. I was a simpleton," she tells us. The truth of the statement sends us reeling into a realization of what we have seen her achieve.

This film is a true female statement as women are not only the main characters on screen, but behind the camera as well. Women also, of course, are the scripter and the author. But I don't find the film feminist. It's about truth, and honesty, and growth. It's about characters who have nothing and how they don't even realize it. It takes until the end of the film for Lange's narration to point us in the right direction of understanding the characters. As Ginny looks at her sister's two younger female offspring, she verbalizes her thoughts about the girls. She sees in them what she and her sisters never had: "Hope." It is only when she tells us what has been missing from her character and Pfieffer's character that we begin to grasp their emotional turmoil and troubled lives fully. It's when we truly understand the story that we have witness.

"A Thousand Acres" is the best drama I've seen in a long time. It is complex, vivid, truthful, vocal, rewarding, depressing and hopeful. Each in the right amount.

Note:

Filmed in Rochelle, Illinois.

Several scenes from the book were deleted for the film, although some of them were filmed and discarded in editing. One scene filmed involved Ginny cooks Rose a poison meal. "Gee, I'm surprised that was out," said Robards after previewing the film. At one point Moorhouse was ready to take her name off the film when Disney demanded a re-cut.

Lange and Pfieffer bought the rights to the novel together.

(Review written in 1997)

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