A Thousand Acres (1997)

A Thousand Acres (1997)

Taglines: Best friends. Bitter rivals. Sisters.

A Thousand Acres movie storyline. Larry Cook (Jason Robards), a prosperous Iowa farmer, decides to retire and split his acres of land among his three daughters, Ginny (Jessica Lange), Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Ginny and Rose happily accept the lucrative agreement to live and work on the farm but Caroline abandons farming for a law career in Des Moines and refuses to take part in the deal.

Larry is consumed with rage and rejects Caroline, leaving Rose and Ginny to go about running the farm with their husbands (Keith Carradine and Kevin Anderson). However, as Larry loses touch with farming life, he begins to lose touch with reality, and his painful descent into senility leaves him bitterly opposed to his daughters’ ways of running the farm.

As she struggles to maintain the farm, Ginny encounters a rift in her relationship with Rose, who reveals that Larry had sexually abused her when she was a child, and insists that he had done the same thing to Ginny. The two women also develop a strong extra-marital attachment to Jess (Colin Firth), the handsome son of a neighboring farmer who is loyal to Larry.

A Thousand Acres (1997)

Paranoid and disillusioned, Larry decides to sue Rose and Ginny in an effort to regain his patriarchal control, and seeks Caroline’s help. The lawsuit divides the family forever, leaving Rose and Ginny to suffer alone while realizing painful truths about their childhood. As Rose and Ginny discover their own individual strengths in the face of adversity, they learn how to survive on their own, without the protection of the farm and the suffocating presence of their father.

A Thousand Acres is a 1997 American drama film directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Robards.

It is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Jane Smiley, which itself is a reworking of William Shakespeare’s King Lear. The character of Larry Cook corresponds to the title character of that play, while the characters of Ginny, Rose and Caroline represent Lear’s daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. The dramatic catalyst in both works is the division of the father’s estate among his three offspring, causing bitter rivalry and ultimately leading to tragedy.

A Thousand Acres Movie Poster (1997)

A Thousand Acres (1997)

Directed by: Jocelyn Moorhouse
Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Colin Firth, Keith Carradine, Kevin Anderson, Pat Hingle, Jason Robards, Anne Pitoniak
Screenplay by: Laura Jones
Production Design by: Dan Davis
Cinematography by: Tak Fujimoto
Film Editing by: Maryann Brandon
Costume Design by: Ruth Myers
Set Decoration by: Andrea Mae Fenton
Art Direction by: James F. Truesdale
Music by: Richard Hartley
MPAA Rating: R for some strong sexual language.
Distributed by: Buena Vista Pictures
Release Date: September 19, 1997

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