Far and Away (1992)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) There’s something ever so slightly… off in Far and Away. Oh, the building blocks of the film are strong: The Irish immigrant experience as seen from a belligerently romantic couple made of a plucky lad and an upper-class woman, climaxing in the very cinematic Oklahoma land rush. It’s a throwback to a successful Hollywood formula, a good framework on which to hang a straightforward narrative and strong visuals. But in practice, as handled by director Ron Howard and co-starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Far and Away ends up feeling derivative and disjointed, a pale copy of better epics. The humour is slightly too strong and overpowering, with the romance displacing potentially more interesting material. It still works — Howard is an efficient director, Kidman looks magnificent, and I haven’t yet seen an Oklahoma land rush sequence that I haven’t liked yet. But the lavish recreation is undermined by a then-contemporary take that is now starting to sound dated. Watching the film in French fortunately spared me from the apparently strange accents of the original, but otherwise couldn’t quite fix other nagging issues with Far and Away.