Word: smileyness
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...have to grant a certain credit to novelist Jane Smiley for the unapologetic boldness with which she appropriated the story of King Lear for her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, resettling his mythical Britannic majesty and his fractious daughters on a modern Iowa farm. You also have to admire the nerve with which she attached pop-psych subtexts to her rearrangement, the daring with which she turned the whole works into a feminist tract...
...Thousand Acres" is derived from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, itself a loose adaptation of King Lear that carries Shakespeare's plot into present-day Iowa. The film veers wildly between a pedestrian fidelity to Smiley's words and a surprising negligence of her plot sequence. The film works, but not nearly as well as it should...
...script itself is often as wobbly as the short-term ententes formed among the characters. Screenwriter Laura Jones, who so bravely and audaciously recontextualized last winter's Portrait of a Lady, shows a disappointing, almost slavish devotion to Smiley's prose. In fact, the movie's first half-hour plays like a book on tape, with transparent thumbnail characterizations ("I guess you remember that Rose always says what she thinks") and redundant observations ("We all understood that something important had just happened...
...Thousand Acres" that a bolder, more harrowing film exists on someone's cutting-room floor. Touchstone Pictures-Disney's live-action film division, i.e. the home of "Pretty Woman" -was notoriously frightened by Moorhouse's first cut, which preserved the higher stakes of secrecy, manipulation, and even murder from Smiley's novel. So displeased was Moorhouse with the changes that only recently was she convinced to have her name among the credits of the film...
...film eventually achieves a fascinating symmetry with the events of its own plot. Like an epic sweep of land or a childhood resentment, a Pulitzer-winning novel is a difficult inheritance, and without proper stewardship can degenerate quickly. The cornerstone virtues of the film-Shakespeare's brutal story and Smiley's ingenious new context-are enough to sustain a solid two-hour drama, but Pfeiffer excepted, the filmmakers reap little from the rich soil they have been handed...