Far and Away (1992)

Just watching the movie (08-04-06) and i still love it. This movie contains a lot of different aspects. The one that is obvious - is of course love. So passionate.. the path is full of obstacles like pride, principals. We all know how hard is to break them, but for the one you love... :) On the other hand - this movie shows that it wasn't easy to live your own life on that period of time. Discrimination, cruelty etc. I found one more line: that it is important to have a dream in your life. If a person does have it, it's so much easier to bear all those down low periods that we all have every now and then. Both actors (Cruise, Kidman) are 100 % belonging to this movie. It leaves the small hope that perhaps there actually IS love like this in the world. just have to look harder :p

Fmovies: I don´t have problems with the accent of Cruise and Kidman - for me they simply speak German... I like this film because the landscape is nice, the story is nice and the end is nice. You cannot always watch movies which are difficult to understand. Sometimes you need a little movie which makes you smile at the end. And "the poor Irish boy gets the rich Protestant girl" is always a good theme.

This film is beautiful. It's wonderful to see Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in a good film. The movie has a pretty good historical point of view so the plot is kind of self telling. The scenery in this is great. And, it's fun to see Tom fight, and Nicole wash clothes. Oh, for the fight scenes nothing gory. For parents: this movie shouldn't be shown to really little kids. For teens it's cute. And, adults well take a crack at it. Oh by the way, a little bit of nudity, but nothing bad. Just trust me. It's a very well done and beautiful film. 9/10 stars.

Far and Away fmovies. This film is a wonderful tale of hope, failure and fulfillment. Unpopular with critics and snobs, it captures history in a rare and rewarding way, that recognizes the trials and travails of the Irish. The Gaels like so many other displaced ethnicities realized their full potential in America.

Most films never develop an audience, and even fewer develop one that transcends generations. `Far and Away' appeals to adults and young people, so much so, that it has recently been re-released in DVD format. It has also established a niche in television rebroadcasts. These annuals rebroadcasts put the lie to the "wisdom" of the critics, and prove the films natural popularity with movie-lovers.

Far and Away is definitely one of my favourite films. The acting and the scenery were both superb and I absolutely loved the story. Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise were both brilliant in their roles and the romance between Shannon and Joseph was very believable (most likely due to the fact that they were married anyway!). Nicole gave a superb performance as Shannon, the scenes in which she is acting the innocent, but rebellious and naive young girl were brilliant. And Tom was superb as the poor but ambitious Joseph. A truly brilliant film which deserves to be on the big screen, I hope to be able to see it at the cinemas one day!

Back in Gone With the Wind Gerald O'Hara tried to tell Katie Scarlett the importance of the land, a lesson she took the entire film to learn. For Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman it's the land, their own bit of land to work as they please and answer to no one.

The story of Far and Away takes place in a very specific time period in the history of both Ireland and America. In Ireland the home rule movement had been dealt a stunning blow with the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell in scandal. Independence had been set back and the landlords were riding high, though not without opposition.

Opposition in this case comes in the form of Tom Cruise and his family who are Irish tenant farmers about to be tossed off their land because they can't pay the exorbitant rents. Turns out the landlord's got a most fetching daughter in Nicole Kidman who's got her eye on the peasant lad.

Far and Away is first and foremost a romance, the rich girl and the poor boy, two beautiful young people we all wish we were. Of course the real affair of Tom and Nicole and their eventual marriage is fairy tale storybook stuff on its own. It sure didn't hurt the film.

They've got a rough road ahead though. In Boston they get exploited by their own people as badly as the English are doing in the old country. Of course their eventual salvation is the Oklahoma land rush where Tom can get his own land to work.

Frederick Jackson Turner was a famous American historian who put forth the thesis that the reason America escaped the class struggles and revolutions of Europe was our frontier. It didn't work out so well for those Indians already there, but the proletarian masses instead of becoming a mob that agitators could stir to revolution just went west and made opportunities. Turner's thesis is still a widely respected paradigm in the study of American history and I think if he could have seen Far and Away, he'd say Ron Howard proved his point.

Speaking of Ron Howard, it's pretty obvious he was influenced by both versions of the Oklahoma land rush previously made in the two films of Edna Ferber's classic Cimarron. He doesn't do badly in recreating Boston of the Gay Nineties and Ireland of the same period.

And Tom and Nicole certainly look beautiful even when she's working in a factory and Tom's getting clobbered in a bare knuckle prize fight. Look for nice performances by Robert Prosky as Nicole's father, Thomas Gibson as Tom's rival for Nicole and Colm Meaney as the Irish political boss in Boston.

Maybe the world needs a frontier to solve its problems.