Bard barred

A Thousand Acres is
no Shakespeare

by Steve Vineberg

Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse. Screenplay by Laura Jones, based on the novel by Jane Smiley. With Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jason Robards, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Colin Firth, Keith Carradine, Kevin Anderson, and Pat Hingle. A Touchstone Pictures release. Opens Friday at the Harbour Mall, Lincoln Mall, Opera House, Showcase (North Attleboro only), Tri-Boro, Warwick Mall, and Woonsocket cinemas.

Bad novels sometimes make good movies. But any hope you might have that the phenomenal cast of A Thousand Acres (Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jason Robards, Keith Carradine) will transform the material, Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-winning novel, is dashed early on, when you hear poor Lange tramping through acres of literary voiceover more or less lifted from the book. The screenwriter, Laura Jones (whose last project was Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady), is more rigidly faithful to the novel -- King Lear retold from Goneril's point of view -- than most filmmakers are to Shakespeare. True, she's left out a few of Smiley's more baroque details (the novel's versions of the blinding of Gloucester and the poisoning of Regan), but the bulk is complete. Here is the strained attempt to parallel Shakespeare's plotting, the preponderance of inexpressive, undramatic details (a major emotional scene takes place during a Monopoly tournament), and the flat, utilitarian prose -- which finds its equivalent in director Jocelyn Moorhouse's square, awkward staging.

When Smiley claims that she had to rewrite Lear because, as a woman, she couldn't identify with it, you feel sorry for her. And when you pick up her novel, you see exactly why she didn't get the play: this is a writer without a lyrical bone in her body. Lear is a fairy tale, a tragic romance where language is powerful enough to divide kingdoms and smash up families. A Thousand Acres is set on an Iowa farm (in 1979 in the book, present-day in the film), where the patriarch, Larry Cook (Robards), takes it into his head to form a corporation and split his farmland among his three daughters. The two eldest, Ginny (Lange) and Rose (Pfeiffer), are understandably pleased. The youngest, Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a Des Moines lawyer, hesitates -- as the voiceover informs us, painstakingly, "She'd spoken as a lawyer when she should have spoken as a daughter" -- just long enough for Daddy to cut her out.

The formal set-up and fabular structure of the play -- and its distanced, Dark Ages setting -- preclude any necessity to justify the king's error in judgment, but a contemporary transcription of it demands some kind of explanation. We don't get one; what we do get is an up-to-the-minute psychological rationale for the behavior of Rose and Ginny -- their father abused them when they were teenagers. And the revelation puts Larry Cook, a mean-mouthed, laconic, pouting old coot, irrevocably over the line into unforgivable, which is a convenient way of disposing of the human evidence if you want to read King Lear as a story about villainous patriarchs and victimized daughters. Poor Jason Robards: Lear is a role to ennoble an actor, but Larry Cook makes him seem puny. It's the only time I can think of when I've ever been embarrassed for him.

Playing a woman whose anger at her father directs the course of her life, Michelle Pfeiffer is trapped: every scene makes the same point, so there's no chance for emotional variety. Fortunately, Jessica Lange, whose character is allowed to evolve, has some wonderful scenes, including one where, having suppressed her memories of sex with her father, she talks about her feelings for him in a rambling, uncertain way, steering around rocks in her path she's not consciously aware are even there. But the casting of these two great beauties in the underbaked roles of unhappy farm wives makes nonsense out of the only part of the plot you might have believed in. Both sisters wind up in bed with a homecoming neighbor (played, without personality, by Colin Firth) because their husbands don't find them desirable -- Lange's because he's sort of sexless and old-maidish (just the kind of role we've all longed to see Keith Carradine play), Pfeiffer's (Kevin Anderson, in a creditable performance) because she's lost a breast to cancer. Come again? Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange can't get their husbands to sleep with them?

A Thousand Acres is pickled in one of those treacly scores you associate with Hallmark Hall of Fame presentations. Even the talented cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, whose credits include Devil in a Blue Dress and most of Jonathan Demme's movies, is reduced to postcard pictorialism. (He does make something out of the rainstorm -- it must have roused him from his lethargy.) The movie is packaged as something worthy and virtuous: an Afterschool Special, except that the incest victims say "fuck" instead of "sexually abuse." Can't you just picture some earnest high-school English teacher somewhere using it as a teaching aid to King Lear? The thought is stupefying, like the movie itself.