Agricultural Film Review

A Thousand Acres (1997)

Director: Jocelyn Moorehouse

USA

Running time: 106 minutes

Summary: The film is based on the novel, A Thousand Acres, written by Jane Smiley. The novel was based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. The story is set in 1980 and is about Larry Cook and his three adult daughters, Ginny, Rose and Caroline. The oldest two girls and the father each have a house on the one thousand acres in Iowa. Caroline is a lawyer and moved away from the farm, but visits often. Cook is proud and quick to remind people that the farm has been in the family for three generations. The family attends a gathering at the neighbor, Harold Clark’s, house to celebrate the return of his son. At the party Harold shows off a brand new tractor. Cook surprises his girls by announcing that he is ready to retire and divides the land into three equal parts giving it to his daughters and their husbands to manage. Soon after the transaction is complete Cook begins acting irritated and regrets his decision. Ginny’s husband and Rose’s husband search for Cook one night when the girls suspect their father is drinking and driving. Cook, drunk and belligerent, argues with the two men and stumbles off into the dark during a storm. The fight over the property divides the family as Caroline sides with Cook combating against Rose and Ginny. The hearing reveals the possibility that the aging Cook might have memory problems and he and his daughter, Caroline, loose the law suit against the other two sisters and Cook moves in with Caroline. There is underlying tension from Rose and Ginny as they discuss their father and sexual abuse they experienced in their teens. Rose’s husband dies in a car accident and Rose reveals an affair to Ginny, who also had an affair with the same man. Ginny leaves the farm and her husband. She ends up working as a waitress and lives in the city in a small apartment. Ginny returns when she finds out that Rose is dealing with breast cancer for a second time.  Rose asks Ginny to take her teenage daughters because she realizes she isn’t going to survive. Ginny and Caroline are forced to sell the farm and Cook dies of a heart attack the next year.

Analysis: The setting is typical Iowa farms with fields of corn and wheat rising and falling on the horizon. The film feeds into the cliché of the American ideal of farming with the families all living in white clapboard houses with large porches and shady yards. There is an excess of over-sized shirts and flowery print dresses. The men drive trucks and the women cook and clean while wearing aprons.  Cook is obviously upset when Harold, the neighbor, shows off his shiny new tractor. The tractor represents the advancement of farming on a larger scale and is a forewarning that change is coming. During the 1980’s farmers in America experienced high debt loads and low crop prices.  The results were catastrophic to family farms. The Cook family experiences their share of the farm crises of the 1980’s and eventually loses the farm selling it to pay off debts. One underlying theme of the movie is the sexual abuse of Rose and Ginny, by their father, that triggers strong emotions that cause more turmoil for the family. At the end of the film Ginny reveals that the houses will be torn down to make way for more fields  which epitomizes the end of an era of wealthy farmers as small farms are being bought up by large corporations using more modern methods of agriculture while pushing out the old-fashioned farmers.

Works Cited

A Crisis in Agriculture on the Great Plains. NebraskaStudies.org. accessed 15 Mar. 2015. Web.

A Thousand Acre. Dir. Jocelyn Moorehouse. Perf. Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange. Mill Creek Entertainment. 1997. DVD.