Basinger brings her aching-orchid
loveliness to the part of Lynn Bracken,
a high-cost hooker made up to imi-
/- tate, by her swanky pimp boss (David
Strathairn), Veronica Lake. The inside
gag is that Basinger is much more
expressive and sexy than Lake; she can
seem bruised, hurt, even before she
does get bruised, and she's like a ghost
enameled in flesh.
Lynn and the neurotic bruiser
White link up as joined pathologies,
yet Hanson isn't keen to show their
sexual connection. He winks it, dan-
gles it like a voyeur. But his camera
burrows with conviction into the bru-
talizing of terrified Mexicans and
blacks, the corpses under floorboards
or in a morgue, the shocks of gunfire,
N the
fist fiestas.
The plot is a worm farm. By the
time it finally makes some sort of
sense, we've halfway given up. What
pulls us along from the thrust and
spew of incidents, the grim traffic of
expendable lives, is the old-time part-
nership that jells between White and
Exley,
with Vincennes,as odd man out
1
(and in).
Or, put plainly: a buddy picture.
Which leaves us way down the road
from Chandler and Hammett, on the
highway to sentimentalized '90s
Hollywood. Try to imagine Sam Spade
and Philip Marlowe becoming pals.
It's enough to make you rush back to
childhood and the Hardy Boys (or
read Jim Thompson, and get drunk).
Despite that slop, the bonding by
bruises and bullets offered as "heart"
for those who want machismo tender-
! ized, L.A. Confidential is full of raw
enticements and rude surprises. One
of the best is the suavest hard guy, an
Irishy cop devil who makes "boy-o"
into a lethal insult. James Cromwell
has never been further from Babe.
Rated R.
* # 1/2

/--

Reviewed by David Elliott

A THOUSAND ACRES

/--

Jason Robards, as the furious
tyrant who owns the precious farm in
A Thousand Acres, remembers an
ancestral time when the land was
under water. We get to see it go
under again, beneath the bilge of the
script.
Adapted by Laura Jones from Jane
Smiley's novel, and directed by Jocelyn
Moorhouse, the film has feminist cre-
dentials in place. Or does it? It
plunges headlong into the foaming
swill of old soapers, when women suf-
fered for men, and from men, then

hung around licking their wounds by
yakking.
Robards plays Larry Cook, wid-
owed patriarch of the family spread in
Iowa. He's dour, sour, bilious. He
makes Henry Fonda in On Golden
Pond seem a temple of reason. When
Larry calls together his three grown
daughters, and the husbands of two of
them (who do most of the farm work)
to announce he is giving them the
farm, via incorporation, he has the
look of a macabre prankster.
The deal delights the oldest sister,
the childless Ginny (Jessica Lange),
and her slogging if sexless husband
(Keith Carradine). It seems to please
the middle sister, Rose (Michelle
Pfeiffer), and her beery, weak husband
(Kevin Anderson). But the youngest,
unmarried Caroline (Jennifer Jason
Leigh), who escaped the farm to
become a lawyer in the city, raises a
whiff of doubt. This so enrages Larry
(it doesn't take much — too much
butter on his taters might do it) that
he disowns her.
Soon, though, Larry and Caroline
are allies against the others. Larry feels
usurped and cast off, even though he
planned the deal. Caroline is a conniv-
er who's never trusted her sisters, and
is complicitous with her father on a
psychic level. A bitter legal feud
ensues, over the farm, but really a
snake fest of old pains — the women
pathetically try to define themselves
through and against their father (as for
their hubbies, give them some Red
Man to chaw).
The court "climax" flops when
Larry has a senility breakdown (he's an
alcoholic, always choleric, finally a
void). The big, bad freight — and if
you can't see this train coming, you've
been asleep through most of the psy-
cho-babbling '80s and '90s - is the
news that the daughters, as teens, were
molested by Larry. Now only Rose
cares to talk about it.
Lange is solid as "eternally hopeful"
Ginny, still wishing to smile even after
Larry calls her "a whore" and worse.
Having spent real farm time, plus
screen duty in Country and Far North,
Lange has the look of an experienced
Grant Wood centerfold. Without
being dull she can do this "think nice"
type, who blanks out on horrors and
seeks to please daddy while really hat-
ing him. Pfeiffer, though vivid and
gutsy (her Rose bares her chest after a
mastectomy), is a goner. There's no
way this bright, luminous woman,
with her lasered honesty and mother
wit, could have bunkered down on the

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