Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 1, 1992 TAG: 9202010413
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
PIONEERING SPIRIT
THERE'S a lot to like about Hallmark Hall of Fame's "O Pioneers!" on CBS Sunday night, not the least of which is Jessica Lange's dramatic debut on network television.In many ways, "O Pioneers!" (at 9 p.m. on WDBJ-Channel 7) will remind viewers of "Sarah, Plain and Tall," which aired last year at this time and won the Emmy for dramatic specials.
Like "Sarah," this one is a period piece about America's settlers. "Sarah" was set in Kansas, "Pioneers" in Nebraska. Both offer beautifully filmed expanses devoid of asphalt roads, telephone lines, billboards, road signs and other intrusions of modern life.
Both were directed by Emmy-winner Glenn Jordan ("Promise") from novels. Both star elegant, blond award-winners - Glenn Close in "Sarah," now Lange.
But Willa Cather's 1913 novel is a little slower in pace than "Sarah," which was based on a children's book, and Lange does not appear until almost halfway through the story, when Alexandra Bergson approaches middle age.
The first half features Heather Graham as the young Alexandra, whose dying father, a Swedish immigrant, entrusts the family's land to her instead of her two brothers.
Josh Hamilton plays the young Carl Linstrum, Alexandra's childhood friend, who leaves the unforgiving prairie to seek a new life farther west. David Strathairn appears later as the adult Carl, who returns to Nebraska and finds that love with Alexandra is still possible.
Like the hardy and determined character she plays, Jessica Lange is also a child of the land. Born in little Cloquet (pop. 9,000), Minn., the granddaughter of farmers, she still owns a 120-acre farm there and visits relatives when she takes her three children to what she still calls "home."
She drew on those roots when she produced and starred in "Country," the 1984 film that told the story of a couple struggling to save their farm from foreclosure. Lange's heroine then, like Cather's Bergson, was a determined woman unwilling to give up the land.
And like the characters of "O Pioneers!", Lange too has Scandinavian lineage and said she understands their sometimes quiet and stubborn side.
"I'm half Finnish and half Dutch and German," she said. "These are very private people, to my mind. I think Cather captures that stoicism, and how Alexandra suffers privately. Everything is internalized, in a way.
"It was an interesting acting problem for me, to play somebody who is so stoic, and who allows so little expression of emotion. There's something almost heroic about the way Cather wrote those characters, and especially that character.
"It was as if she [Alexandra] were a visionary, in a sense . . . I wanted to find a way to make her a very passionate woman, but without the usual means of expressing passion. It was a quiet part. Other things, when you can let out all the stops, are easier to do."
By the time Lange appears in "O Pioneers!" the story has jumped two decades, and Alexandra Bergson has become the mistress of a thriving farm. By then the sod house on the prairie has been replaced by an imposing, two-story farmhouse rising out of the plains. It is, Lange said, "very, very true to the novel."
Lange said she read and reread Cather's novel as the story was being filmed.
"The language, the dialogue, the fact that what she wrote was so perfect in a sense and so beautiful, almost poetic - it was truly literature," she said. "To use her dialogue was an incredible treat. It's very rare, especially in film, in screenplays, that you have that kind of language. Glenn [Jordan, the director] and I kept going back to the book to get as much verbatim dialogue as we could. When Alexandra did speak, it really was a voice; it was something."
Alexandra Bergson's is a gentle voice, but the voice of authority. She overcomes fears and skepticism about eccentric old white-bearded Ivar (Tom Aldredge) and her brothers' mistrust of the returning Carl, who they think has come back to cash in on their hard-won prosperity.
Readers of Cather's book will also recall that there is a second love story in "O Pioneers!", that of Marie (Anne Heche), a flirtatious young woman married to a bitter husband, and Alexandra's youngest brother, Emil (Reed Diamond). That one ends in tragedy and dashes Alexandra's long-held hopes for Emil.