Rose and Ginny are two of three daughters of a powerful and revered Iowa farmer named Larry Cook (Jason Robards). The third daughter, Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), has become a lawyer in the city. The tragic events in Smiley’s novel, as in ““Lear,’’ are set off when the patriarch quixotically announces his plans to divide his land among his three offspring. But Smiley turns Shakespeare on its head–for the heroines here are those arch-villainesses Goneril and Regan, and the Lear figure is a malevolent patriarch who has inflicted ghastly psychological damage on his children. From under the family’s Grant Wood surface, poisonous fumes rise.
Rose, the mother of two, recovering from a mastectomy, is a woman fueled by rage (““The more pissed off I feel, the better I am’’), while the childless Ginny, passive and repressed, tries to smooth over the buried antagonisms that are wrenching this deeply dysfunctional family apart. These complex, fully realized women are Smiley’s triumph, and Lange and Pfeiffer, playing an eloquent emotional duet, bring them vividly to life.
Moorhouse and her fellow Australian screenwriter Laura Jones succeed where it counts, capturing the close, sometimes bitterly fraught relationship between the sisters. The men in the tale–Rose’s unstable husband (Kevin Anderson), Ginny’s virtuous but obtuse mate (Keith Carradine) and the neighbor’s seductive son Jess (Colin Firth)–are merely sketched in. The storytelling, full of dark secrets and impassioned outbursts, can seem melodramatic and clunky at times, and Moorhouse doesn’t have much feel for the Iowa landscape or for the community that demonizes the two sisters. But if the movie isn’t all it could have been, when Pfeiffer and Lange are on screen, you don’t want to be anywhere else.
By coincidence, the two stars had neighboring offices at Orison Pictures back in 1992, when both received early galleys of Smile’s novel. They immediately turned to each other and smiled: this was the project they had been waiting for. ““In the beginnine we didn’t really decide who was going to play what character,’’ says Pfeiffer, who admits she always wanted to play Rose. ““I loved her struggle, I loved her fight. She had this uncontrollable urge to speak the truth. This movie scared me a lot. This was one that I knew I could fail on in a big way.’’ Lange was scared, too, at the prospect of playing Ginny. ““Ginny’s passive. I’ve never had to play a character like that before. At the beginning of the film I used to walk around the set and say, “God, I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing here.’ But I always had the novel as my guideline. I kept it with me every second of the day.''
Though it was a five-year struggle to get the movie made, the shoot itself, according to the stars, was mainly harmonious. ““Jessica and I didn’t know each other very well before this movie. I didn’t even really talk to her until we were literally walking to the set to do our first scene together. But the work was effortless.’’ Lange agrees: ““There was not one moment in that suspended reality that I didn’t believe that she was Rose and that she was my sister.''
The problems came after the shooting ended, when Moorhouse (““How to Make an American Quilt’’) turned in her cut. Everyone was disappointed. The story meandered; the emotion got lost. The producers hired an outside editor to come in and work alongside Moorhouse’s editor. The director stormed off, threatening to take her name off the movie.
With the input of the stars and the producers a new version emerged. ““My feeling was the storytelling was not clear,’’ says Lange of that first cut. ““I had no problem shooting with Jocelyn,’’ says Pfeiffer. ““Postproduction was the hard thing. It may have been that she was too close to it. We were all too close to it. It took bringing in a new editor who was objective and brutal. It’s still Jocelyn’s movie.''
In this age of the auteur, interfering with a director’s ““vision’’ is a great heresy. But in the real world, not all directors are created equal, and not all directors are always right. Movies are a collaborative art. Whatever Moorhouse’s side of the story is (she declined to be interviewed), she has kept her name on the picture, and she deserves credit for creating the conditions that allowed Pfeiffer and Lange’s magic to blossom. It may have taken fights to get there, but the movie still feels like a labor of love.
