The problem is a real one: the plight of the modern-day Midwest farmer in the face of government foreclosures. But the portrait here is hinged entirely on a romantic notion of 19th-century frontier individualism that we cannot believe has come into the present day, or much past Willa Cather's day for that matter, with so little erosion from 20th-century realities. As a hedge against this romanticism, the movie adopts a style of stoical understatement which is in itself a cosmopolite's sentimentalism about simple folk. And this general tenor only means that the movie will have a harder time rousing itself (and its audience) at those moments when Jessica Languid revs up and delivers one of her big lines: "This land's been in my family for over a hundred years' or (to the villainous banker): "I tell you I'd rather be a thief than do what you do for a living" or (with a baby in her arms and the music swelling): "When you come to pull us off our land you better come with more than just a piece of paper!" Ultimately, a social problem that can be traced to the individual meanness of a petty bureaucrat and can be solved by a sudden decree from a Federal Judge is not much of a social problem. And if such a solution must be taken care of in a printed epilogue rather than a dramatized episode, it is no sort of movie solution at all. With Sam Shepard and Wilford Brimley; written by William D. Wittliff, who was dismissed as director and replaced by Richard Pearce. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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