Word: smiley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...referring to her technique in movies that are adapted from novels. "I'll just take every page of the novel that refers to my part and paste it to the corresponding page in the script." When the novels in question are such highly regarded works as Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and Henry James' Washington Square, which open within a few weeks of each other, this strategy can be a little intimidating for the directors. The two movies allowed Leigh to play the devoted but misunderstood daughter of two men she knew as a child: Jason Robards...
...have to grant a certain credit to novelist Jane Smiley for the unapologetic boldness with which she appropriated the story of King Lear for her Pulitzer prize-winning novel, A Thousand Acres, resettling his mythical Britannic majesty and his fractious daughters on a modern Iowa farm. You also have to admire the nerve with which she attached pop-psych subtexts to her rearrangement, the daring with which she turned the whole works into a feminist tract...
...sober realism of her style that redeemed the novel, its weight and conviction that prevented readers from noticing (or caring) that by replacing noble enigmas with banal behaviorism, Smiley had downsized tragedy to melodrama. The movie version--bereft of diverting literary stratagems, relentlessly focused on what-next narrative--takes it another step down--to soap opera...
...Thousand Acres" that a bolder, more harrowing film exists on someone's cutting-room floor. Touchstone Pictures-Disney's live-action film division, i.e. the home of "Pretty Woman" -was notoriously frightened by Moorhouse's first cut, which preserved the higher stakes of secrecy, manipulation, and even murder from Smiley's novel. So displeased was Moorhouse with the changes that only recently was she convinced to have her name among the credits of the film...
...film eventually achieves a fascinating symmetry with the events of its own plot. Like an epic sweep of land or a childhood resentment, a Pulitzer-winning novel is a difficult inheritance, and without proper stewardship can degenerate quickly. The cornerstone virtues of the film-Shakespeare's brutal story and Smiley's ingenious new context-are enough to sustain a solid two-hour drama, but Pfeiffer excepted, the filmmakers reap little from the rich soil they have been handed...