Larry - Lear Ginny - Goneril Rose - Regan Caroline - Cordelia. The story involves a tyrannical old patriarch, Larry Cook (Jason Robards, whose skills are not really utilized), who, apparently forgetting the unpleasant fate that befell Lear, decides to give his farm away to his three daughters - Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). It does have superior acting, but that's not nearly enough. Ploddingly literal, 'A Thousand Acres' is basically a star vehicle that relies on superior acting to redeem it. Perhaps if they had added new material, approached Smiley's story from different directions, they could have made a film that would have been truer to the spirit, if not the letter, of her book. But there's no forgiving their bowdlerizing of Smiley's slo-mo psychological horror show, giving it a kinda-upbeat ending and omitting the inconvenient fact that the narrator tries to kill her sister. Although the first half hour is really dreadful, with its hokey plot-establishing voice-over and choppy, melodramatic action, it's not easy to imagine how director Jocelyn Moorhouse and screenwriter Laura Jones could have better compressed all the necessary story elements. 'A Thousand Acres' may simply be one of those books that can't be made into anything but a plot-driven movie-of-the-week. The movie fails to convey any of the book's strengths - and it magnifies its shortcomings into bathetic clichis. Unfortunately, these literary achievements - created by tone and nuance as well as the sheer hypnotic effect of time spent turning the pages - are not easily captured by film. Furthermore, the sensitive-unto-death narrative voice was dissonant and grating: Ginny came across as too intelligent and self-aware to be as clueless and numb as she was supposed to be.ĭespite these major flaws, however, Smiley's au courant revisiting of 'King Lear' had its virtues: keen insights into family dynamics, a stately, beautifully controlled pace and a weirdly chipper, let's-do-the-dishes-everybody quality that only heightened the ominous sound of fatal machinery grinding away beneath the banal surface of Happy, Happy American life. For True Believers in 'Repressed Memory Syndrome,' this might sound like gospel: I found it melodramatic and bogus.

I just didn't believe that the book's protagonist and narrator, a 37-year-old Iowa farm wife named Ginny, could have completely repressed the fact that her father had sex with her when she was 15 years old, night after night, for a year. I WASN'T KNOCKED OUT by Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 novel 'A Thousand Acres.' For one thing, the book's 'dark secret' seemed utterly implausible.

A thousand acres novel