Far and Away

Rating:
Summary: Ron Howard's "Wondrous epic"
Review: Don't listen to the haters who call this truly "wondrous" film anything less than a masterpiece. Those who claim FAR AND AWAY has no plot are the same who would likely say the same of MOULIN ROUGE. It seems that a great love story these days is no longer enough, but perhaps only for those who don't really know what love is.

FAR AND AWAY has been my favorite film since I was about 10 or 11 and my parents rented the film. I'm 20 now and I recently saw the film again--it is as wondrous and moving and sweet and beautiful as it ever was. It is a film grand in scope. It is a great glimpse at how talented Nicole Kidman was, even then.

Rating:
Summary: No day, no night ,no moment can hold them back from trying
Review: Then-husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman headlined this 1992 Ron Howard release. Joseph Donnelly (Cruise) is the headstrong brother of a family of tenant farmers, who finds himself on the boat to America after he originally went to his landlord's mannor to avenge his father's death.

Donnelly does not initially realize that Mr. Christie is actually a likeable (if absent minded) fellow, and it is his family associates who are responsible for the murder and the home burning. These Protestants look down upon the Catholic Donnellys (among many other families) as being beneath them.

While there, he meets their daughter Shannon, a firebrand self-described modern woman who would do ANYTHING to avoid ending up like her mother's stuffy Victorian friends. From ridding fast to wearing free clothes, Shannon wants much more out of life than what she originally had. When she teams up with Joseph, she gets it.

After her spoons are convieniently stolen upon arrival in America, Shannon comes to the painful realization that she does not know what to do. She is now in the position of having to learn survival skills from Joseph (who poses as her brother) if she is going to make it out to Oklahoma.

Sure, improbabilities abound in this film (Cruise hangs out with brothel girls in an age before the ready availability of condoms, but never gets venereal disease, Shannon and her family are magically reunited in Boston even after she wanted nothing to do with them and did not appear to know their new address, and Mr. Christie himself has no problems pulling his own weight in America while the rest of his family had not known how to do these things).

An excellent camera panning, a generally good script, and the hit 'book of days' by Enya easily compensate for any flaws. You become so involved in this film that the screenplay length ultimately does not matter. Well-crafted suprises maintain interest in the entire story.

Cruise and Kidman's off-screen romance is by now a distant memory, but this film will keep your own passions burning brightly.