MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Far’: Panoramic Period Piece

The kids get to play dress-up in “Far and Away,” get to toddle around in the shoes of their elders and betters. Tom Cruise tries Clark Gable on for size, Nicole Kidman has a go at Barbara Stanwyck, and director Ron Howard sees what it’s like to be the legendary John Ford. Like all games of pretend, it’s more silly than painful, but what it mostly does is make you long deeply for the real thing.

A tale of two young people, a figurative princess and a genuine pauper, who, thanks to a series of cockamamie plot twists, end up traveling together from highbound Ireland to the free shores of these here United States, “Far and Away” is typical of recent studio attempts to do big-budget, old-fashioned, audience-pleasing epics. It’s strong as can be in terms of production values and panoramic photography (as befits its $70-million budget) and weak as watery tea when it comes to little things like dialogue and character development.

Much has been made in the pre-release publicity of the film’s climactic Oklahoma land rush sequences, filmed with a full nine cameras, one on a helicopter, others buried deep under the earth, and all loaded with a vivid new 65mm film stock, the first time that that oversize negative has been used in more than two decades.

And though those climactic 20 minutes have a cornball energy and excitement to them, they unfortunately follow a full two hours that is much less easy on the soul. Always preposterous and occasionally tedious, the bulk of “Far and Away” underlines the pitfalls of making a great-looking movie with not a whiff of originality to its name.

Take, for instance, the way director Howard and screenwriter Bob Dolman (whose previous feature “Willow” was equally uninspired) have boxed themselves into a corner where romance is concerned. Though everyone in the theater knows that brash young Joseph Donnelly (Cruise) and the strawberry blond spitfire Shannon Christie (Kidman) will fall into each others arms before the final credits roll, Howard and Dolman insist on engaging in a frenzied quest to pile cliched obstacles in their way like so many stacks of cordwood. Although some of this is part of the game and to be expected, so much time passes before the two so much as even gently kiss that the capacity crowd that viewed the film at Cannes Film Festival, where it was the festival’s closing film, burst into spontaneous and bemused applause when the big moment finally came.

Certainly, no one but a Hollywood screenwriter would imagine that these two would ever have more than a country of origin in common. When we first meet Cruise’s Joseph, looking unintentionally silly as he wrestles with a load of peat and a recalcitrant mule, it is 1892 and the tenant farmers of western Ireland like his father are starting to get grumpy about not owning the soil they work.

In fact, the senior Donnelly makes sure to tell Joseph before he dies, which he very quickly does, that “without land, a man is nothing. Land is a man’s own soil.” Words, it turns out, to live by, for Joseph, though he wears a humble cloth cap, is a dreamer of the big dream.

Holding the hated wealthy landlord, Daniel Christie, responsible for his father’s death, Joseph sets out on that same mule to take his revenge. Thanks to events too boggling to detail, he ends up instead on a large boat to America, accompanying, of all people, the landlord’s high-spirited daughter Shannon, a jazz playing hellion who is much too modern to tolerate the stifling conformity of her homeland. She’s heard they’re giving land away in America, and, if you don’t mind, she wants some of her very own.

Of course, Joseph and Shannon have fallen madly in love the moment they met. But will they admit it to each other, will they so much as allow a civil word to pass between them? Of course not. Instead, like an Edwardian version of “Moonlighting’s” David and Maddy, they bicker, bicker, bicker.

They bicker in Ireland, they bicker on the boat, they even bicker in Boston, where circumstances (don’t ask) conspire to have them sharing a room as brother and sister above a whorehouse. She goes to work as, no kidding, a chicken plucker, while he, filled with an understandable sexual tension that has no immediate hope of release, becomes a bare-knuckle boxer of fearsome repute. And they both continue to dream of Oklahoma, and all that free land.

Although anyone looking for memorable performances is standing in the wrong line, both Cruise and Kidman, a couple in real life and cast strictly for star appeal, acquit themselves without too much embarrassment here.

Cruise even does a creditable job with an Irish accent and looks much more believable (not to mention cuter) as a bare-chested Boston boxer than he did as an Irish peasant.

And in the hands of cinematographer Mikael Salomon, the 70mm print made from that 65mm negative performs as advertised, giving “Far and Away” a visual intensity in unusual richness of detail. In fact, when it comes to scenes where dialogue is not a factor, like Joseph’s bare-knuckle brawls and his and Shannon’s arrival at the teeming port of Boston, “Far and Away” very much keeps its end of the bargain.

Whenever anyone opens their mouths, unfortunately, everything changes. Not only is the dialogue invariably flat, but every situation, every character is hopelessly derivative of older, more interesting movies, a situation that can be perversely diverting, but not finally satisfying.

It’s almost as if director Howard, who literally grew up on sets and on location, cannot tell movie reality from the real thing and doesn’t know dialogue that rings hollow when he hears it. Which, given his facility for large-scale action and his clearly sincere intention to provide quality popular entertainment, is very much of a shame.

‘Far and Away’

Tom Cruise: Joseph

Nicole Kidman: Shannon

Thomas Gibson; Stephen

An Imagine Films Entertainment Presentation of a Brian Grazer Production, released by Universal. Director Ron Howard. Producer Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Executive producer Todd Hallowell. Screenplay by Bob Dolman. Cinematographer Mikael Salomon A.S.C. Editors Michael Hill and Daniel Hanley. Costumes Joanna Johnston. Music John Williams. Production design Jack T. Collis and Allan Cameron. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13