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

A rail modality yard Acres as Movie is Melodramatic and Bogus   Perhaps Jane Smileys Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres was a bit over-rated. For one thing, the books dark secret seemed dead implausible. I just didnt believe that the books protagonist and narrator, a 37-year-old Iowa farm wife named Ginny, could have completely repressed the fact that her father had sex with her when she was 15 years old, night after night, for a year. For True Believers in subdue Memory Syndrome, this might sound alike gospel I ensnare it melodramatic and bogus. Furthermore, the sensitive-unto-death narrative voice was dissonant and grating Ginny came across as too intelligent and self-aware to be as clueless and damp as she was supposed to be.   Despite these major flaws, however, Smileys au courant revisiting of King Lear had its virtues acuate insights into family dynamics, a stately, beautifully controlled pace and a weirdly chipper, lets-do-the-dishes-everybody qual ity that altogether heightened the ominous sound of fatal machinery grinding apart beneath the unoriginal surface of Happy, Happy American life. Unfortunately, these literary achievements -- created by tone and spectre as well as the sheer hypnotic effect of period spent turning the pages -- are not easily captured by film. The celluloid 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 further a plot-driven movie-of-the-week. Although the first half hour 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 world and Roses.   Smileys novel is filled with an unnecessary sum up of family horror -- she could have achieved the same artistic effects without sprinkling on t he Gothic MSG. But the interiority of the novel form allows us to look away from the lurid plot, to follow the subtler movement of Ginnys mind. Moorhouse halfheartedly tries to tell the story from Ginnys point of view, but she keeps going back to the external, epic vision. Instead of feeling like an epic, however, A Thousand Acres feels like a soap opera -- an delineation 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 court 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.