![]() ![]() He shoots at Banderas to drive him away, he beats his wife, he alienates his daughter, and, still not satiated, he runs for the Senate as a conservative. Now the stage is set for what the publicists like to call a stirring tale of love and tragedy, set against a backdrop of revolution and revenge.Įsteban has been established as a thoroughly rotten scoundrel, so selfish he banishes his own sister (Close) from the ranch for growing too friendly with his wife. She falls in love with the son of Esteban's foreman - a hotheaded young man named Pedro ( Antonio Banderas) who preaches revolution to the workers. She has taken a vow of silence years before, but breaks it to tell him, "You have come to propose marriage to me." He takes his bride back to his ranch, where in the fullness of time they have a daughter (Ryder). ![]() One day he returns to the city, and sees his fiance's younger sister Clara (Meryl Streep), now grown to young womanhood. Laboring in the gold fields, he makes good on his promise - but then, after his fiance is killed by poison meant for her father, Esteban moves to an isolated ranch and devotes 20 years to turning it into a showplace.Īlong the way he demonstrates his cruelty and selfishness by raping peasant women and crushing his workers under an iron heel. As it opens, an ambitious young man named Esteban (Irons) is in love with a rich man's daughter, and vows to become rich enough to marry her. The story spans three generations of a family that lives in a country not unlike Chile or Argentina. Winona Ryder, who plays the daughter of Irons and Close, also seems an unlikely casting choice (especially if you think of her in " The Age of Innocence"), but she is more convincing, with more abandon and passion, and she makes her character work. As an ancient senator, outraged by being treated with lack of respect, he seems more like a transplanted European earl than an offended South American landowner. But whatever he does, he always seems to be a man in the wrong society. Irons in particular does a wellcrafted job of aging from a very young man to a very old one. To borrow Mark Twain's complaint about women's swearing, "They know the words, but not the music." It is not that Irons, Streep and Close are bad actors here not at all. And what odd thinking must have gone into the casting of the movie: Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close form a checklist of the "last actors you'd think of while reading the famous novel by Isabel Allende, widow of the slain Chilean leader. ![]()
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