Far and Away
Overview
Far and Away is a 1992 epic romantic adventure drama directed by Ron Howard that sends Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman on a sweeping journey from the poverty and landlord oppression of 1892 Ireland to the promise and brutality of the American frontier. Joseph Donnelly begins the film as a poor tenant farmer with nothing but Irish stubbornness and a burning desire to own land — an ambition that seemed impossible in a country where land ownership was the exclusive privilege of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. Shannon Christie is the daughter of the landlord Joseph initially set out to kill, whose own romantic disappointment and thirst for adventure make her a willing, if supremely inconvenient, traveling companion. Their journey together — first class and steerage sharing a very different view of America's promise — is captured with genuine historical sweep and a visual grandeur that Ron Howard's widescreen ambitions always excel at delivering. The Oklahoma Land Rush sequence, staged and shot at enormous scale, remains one of the most technically ambitious set pieces in early 1990s Hollywood cinema. John Williams' score is among his most romantically expansive. The film is unashamedly old-fashioned in its storytelling — big emotions, grand gestures, and a belief in the immigrant experience as both tragedy and triumph. Far and Away is the kind of epic Hollywood romance that the studios mostly stopped making and that audiences still secretly want.
