# Thousand Acres, A (1997)

### reviewed by
James Sanford

A THOUSAND ACRES(Touchstone/Buena Vista)Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse The film adaptation of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Thousand Acres" works so hard to pack as much of the book into an hour and 45 minutes that it feels like the highlights tape pulled from several months of a daytime soap-opera. Incest, lawsuits, broken marriages, impulsive affairs, senility, cancer, suicide: They're all present and accounted for. You'll barely have time to weep over one crisis before an even worse one pops up. But at the heart of this sometimes strident movie are two magnificent performances, which redeem everything that surrounds them. As the relentlessly downbeat and vengeance-hungry Rose, Michelle Pfeiffer all but breathes fire. Mad about everything---and mad at herself besides---Rose rips away years of cover-ups to reveal her family's darkest secrets, as well as her private hell. When Pfeiffer challenges her husband (Kevin Anderson) after a ruined game of Monopoly, it's a scene Bette Davis would have come back from the grave to play. Equally "wow"-worthy is Jessica Lange as the serene, industrious Ginny, whose perpetual happy face finally cracks and disintegrates. Few actresses give themselves over to a role as thoroughly as Lange does: She leaps into the pit at the bottom of Ginny's soul, unafraid of where she'll land. Playing off the equally determined Pfeiffer seems to sharpen her instincts even more; plenty of sparks fly before the finale. Laura Jones's screenplay sometimes short-sells the novel's themes and its' characters' motivations, but the priviledge of watching two of America's finest leading ladies scaling new dramatic heights is reason enough to put "Acres" on your must-see list. James Sanford

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