Far and Away

Far and Away (1992) is about emigration from Ireland to America, made while Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were actually married. 1892. Joseph is the son of a poor Irish tenant farmer. When his father dies because of the landlord's men he goes to settle it, and things escalate. Fleeing, he is joined by Shannon, the landlord's daughter, who was planning to run to America anyway. They reach Boston and the promise of America collapses immediately. Joseph fights bare knuckle, Shannon works in a factory, and the two share a room by pretending to be siblings. What the film is aiming at is the Oklahoma land rush at the end. It really happened, in 1893: a pistol is fired at a set hour, thousands of people race onto empty land by horse and wagon, and whoever drives a stake into a plot owns it. Ron Howard shot the sequence on a large scale and it is the best fifteen minutes in the film. It was shot on 65mm negative. The format had been nearly abandoned by then, which makes this one of the last major productions filmed that way. The Irish accents were criticised for years, with reason. It runs 140 minutes, which is long. Good for: period epics, emigration stories, and old fashioned Hollywood scale. Less good for: it is long and unevenly paced, the romance is predictable, and the fight scenes are hard.