Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1984

The Contenders:

Vanessa Redgrave: The Bostonians
Jessica Lange: Country
Judy Davis: A Passage to India
Sally Field: Places in the Heart (winner)
Sissy Spacek: The River

Married to the Land

Film: The River
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There is a mystique about the American family farm that for whatever reason has long been a staple of a certain brand of American story. It’s only natural that film producers would jump on this particular bandwagon from time to time. The mid-‘80s was definitely that time. The River came out in 1984, a year before John Mellencamp released Scarecrow about the plight of the small farmer and the year before FarmAid, the benefit concert to benefit the same. It’s not much of a shock that The River would highlight the same basic plight.

Just so you know what we’re getting into here, The River is going to be two hours of misery even if we wind up with an uplift in the last couple of minutes. We’ll have good guys who we root for and who get constantly kicked and a bad guy who we’ll root against. And for two hours we’ll watch the good guys get screwed by the bad guys and we’ll feel bad for them. I wasn’t 10 minutes into the movie when I figured out that this was going to be one of those misery parfait movies of bad things piled on top of people who struggle mightily under the weight of the rich guys who want to run them off their land.