Synopsis

On a prosperous Iowa farm, patriarch Larry Cook announces that he will retire and divide his thousand acres among his three daughters. The arrangement initially appears generous, but old resentments, family secrets, and conflicting ideas about loyalty soon surface. As the sisters struggle with the farm, their marriages, and their father's authority, the inheritance becomes the catalyst for a devastating family confrontation.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film adapts Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which reworks Shakespeare's "King Lear" as a modern story about an Iowa farming family.

• Although the story is set in Iowa, much of the location filming took place on farms near Rochelle, Illinois.

• The production was released by Touchstone Pictures in the United States on September 19, 1997.

• The film was made on an estimated $28 million budget but earned approximately $7.9 million worldwide.

• Its visual design contrasts the broad openness of the farmland with the increasingly claustrophobic relationships within the Cook family.

• The film was released on home video in 1998.