A Thousand Acres as Movie is Melodramatic and Bogus Essay example -- M

A Thousand Acres as Movie is Melodramatic and simulated   Perhaps Jane Smileys Pulitzer Prize-winning figment A Thousand Acres was a trash over-rated. For iodin thing, the books dark secret seemed utterly implausible. I just didnt mean that the books protagonist and narrator, a 37-year-old Iowa farm wife named Ginny, could have completely oppress the fact that her father had sex with her when she was 15 years old, night after(prenominal) night, for a year. For True Believers in Repressed Memory Syndrome, this might exit same gospel I found it melodramatic and bogus. Furthermore, the sensitive-unto-death narrative part was dissonant and grating Ginny came across as too intelligent and self-aw be to be as clueless and numb as she was supposed to be.   disdain these major flaws, however, Smileys au courant revisiting of King Lear had its virtues keen insights into family dynamics, a stately, beautifully controlled ill-treat and a weirdly chipper, lets-do-the-dishe s-everybody quality that only heightened the ominous sound of portentous machinery grinding away beneath the banal surface of Happy, Happy American life. Unfortunately, these literary achievements -- created by tone and nuance as well as the sheer hypnotic effect of time spent turning the pages -- are not easily captured by film. The movie fails to convey any of the books strengths -- and it magnifies its shortcomings into bathetic clichés.   A Thousand Acres may simply be one of those books that cant be made into anything but a plot-driven movie-of-the-week. Although the first half min is really dreadful, with its hokey plot-establishing voice-over and choppy, melodramatic action, its not easy to imagine how director Jocelyn Moorhouse an... ... or the face-off between her way of living in the cosmea and Roses.   Smileys unused is filled with an unnecessary amount of family horror -- she could have achieved the comparable artistic effects without sprinkling o n the Gothic MSG. But the interiority of the novel form allows us to look away from the lurid plot, to follow the subtler safari of Ginnys mind. Moorhouse halfheartedly tries to tell the story from Ginnys point of view, but she keeps going back to the external, grand vision. Instead of feeling like an epic, however, A Thousand Acres feels like a soap opera -- an impression not lessened by the soupy this-is-a-sad-scene music and the treacly voice-over that keeps telling us what just happened -- going to chat up had divided us from each other. If Shakespeare spun a few times when Smileys novel came out, he must be rotating like an eggbeater now.