COLIN FIRTH IN

GENRE: drama

DIRECTOR: Jocelyne Moorhouse

SCREENPLAY: Laura Jones, based on Jane Smiley's Pulitzer prize-winning novel "A Thousand Acres", 1991.

PRODUCER: Thomas A Bliss et al

PRINCIPAL CAST: Jessica Lange [Ginny], Michelle Pfeffer [Rose], Colin Firth [Jess], Jason Robards [Larry], Jennifer Jason Leigh [Caroline], Keith Carradine, Kevin Anderson et al

ABOUT THE FILM: This is a modern King Lear, set in rich american farmland. The patriarch [Larry] decides to retire and leave the farm to his three daughters. The two eldest [Ginny and Rose] are delighted but young Caroline rejects the idea and the father cuts her out. This sets off a series of events that leave none of them unchanged. Colin Firth plays the neighbour Jess who returns home after thirteen years and gets romantically involved with Ginny and Rose.

About playing Jess:
Jess Clark returns home after years of wandering, seemingly freedom-loving but actually manipulative and vain. But Firth, of course, cannot condemn Jess if he is to get inside his skin. In this case he is reminded of a friend who like Jess lost his mother early: He needed to make every woman fall in love with him. He would cry with all of them and announce every time. "That's the first time I've cried since my mother died".

I don't believe that was cynical. He was licking his wounds with every woman he met. When Jess pours on the sensitivity with Ginny and Rose you might see that as his narcissism, but I see it as his pride in his sensitivity. I don't believe it's cynical. He actually appealed to me the most when he became violent, because that is when he is most honest. [US Vogue, September 1997]

From the UK Empire Magazine review:
It's unsurprising that A Thousand Acres didn't register a blip at the US box office. But it must have been disappointing to Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange, whose production companies joined forces to make the film, that their gut-wrenching performances went largely overlooked.

Adapted from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, this is King Lear transferred to the contemporary American midwest. Smiley went further and feminist, re-imagining the story from the point of view of the two elder daughters, the villainesses of the play but the heroines in this intense rewrite.

The problem is that this has the feel of an academic exercise, a feminist exploration of mythic motifs, rather than a true emotional epic. There is an air of dramatic strain, although one finds no fault with the heartfelt performances of Pfeiffer and Lange, who shrewdly opted for reversal of type roles for their collaboration, Lange taking the softer, more vulnerable, ever-loving Ginny and Pfeiffer powerful as the wilder, sexier, angry and explosive Rose. Sadly for them, the film is doomed to the label "interesting". [Empire Magazine, June 1998]

MY RATING:** I've seen better films dealing with betrayal and incest, most recently Anjelica Huston's "Bastard out of Carolina" which I'd rather recommend... unless you are a devoted Firth fan of course ;-)