Kaitlin Alfvin

Far and Away

Year: 1992

Director: Alan Johnson

Far and Away takes place in 1893 during a time where only the rich owned land in Ireland and America was giving away plots of land out west for free. This dramatic comedy uses a wealthy Irish girl and poor Irish boy to shows the struggles immigrants experienced when moving to America at the time. Giving our generation a taste of the struggles of early Americans through a comic drama.
The director chose to start off the film with a landscape scene of Ireland, showing the poor working on the land for their landlord. Then bringing in the landlords enforcers who are shown burning houses and running through the town scaring the people into reaching their quotas for the landlord. This shows the importance of the theme of land through out the film. Intentionally showing viewers that the measure of a man is based on the land he owns.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman play the main characters chosen by the director and used to show the two sides of the Ireland lifestyle in 1893. Later it is seen how their lifestyles becomes one in the same when they find themselves struggling to survive in America. Although they had polar opposite lifestyles in Ireland, it shows that in America it did not matter who was rich and who was poor but they had equal opportunity to succeed. Although this was a fictional film, the directors did their best to capture the truths about Ireland and the immigrant system in 1893. This generation is reliant on entertainment, so in order to sit through a film about historical events, romance and comedy must find its way into the film for it to find success.