Far And Away movie review & film summary (1992)
Joseph vows vengeance and goes off to murder the man (and is bid a cheerful farewell by the entire village, so little does he conceal his intentions). But when he is discovered lurking in a stable and beaten to within an inch of his life by the sadistic overseer, he's taken into the landlord's mansion for treatment, and there he first becomes attracted to his rebellious, headstrong daughter Shannon, played by Nicole Kidman.
She is tired of being a proper, well-behaved young lady, and yearns to go to America, where she hears that land is being given away. Encountering Joseph by chance a little later in Dublin, she asks him to come along with her, and with nothing to lose, he does.
Their chance encounter is not an accident, but the basic strategy of the entire plot, which is a series of chance encounters. Perhaps that is because the story is so arbitrary and the characters so transparent that nothing that happens can be explained on any level higher than coincidence.
Of course, Joseph and Shannon travel as brother and sister.
It is an ancient convention of such story formulas that the young man and woman (who anyone can see are destined for one another) must go through a period of mutual antagonism before - hello! - they realize they're in love. Landing in Boston, they find lodgings in a brothel, and young Joseph goes to work as a bare-knuckle fighter, gaining some local acclaim. Why a brothel and not a boarding house? The movie is desperate for local color.
Why, you might ask in the same vein, does Joseph become a boxer, instead of some more likely occupation, such as a street-cleaner, a hod-carrier or a longshoreman? Because the movie hasn't a clue who these people are, or why we should find them intrinsically interesting, and so it cobbles together cliches out of old boxing movies to provide a third-hand narrative and manufactured suspense.
Here's the test you can always apply to a boxing scene: Is the most important thing about the fight who wins, or why the hero is boxing? In "Raging Bull" it was the latter - what drove him to such punishment. In "Far and Away," it's who wins - and of course the outcome of every fight is determined entirely by the needs of the story. We even get the exhausted cliche in which the hero is pounded to a pulp before suddenly he gets really angry, and pounds the other guy to a pulp.
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