The Field
Writer-director Jim Sheridan seems unlikely to repeat the deserved success he won last year with My Left Foot. His new film, based on a play by John B. Keane, is as overwrought as his last one was understated. Set in Ireland in the Thirties, the film stars Richard Harris as Bull McCabe, a tenant farmer who tries to buy the field he's rented all his life from a wealthy widow (Frances Tomelty) who hates him. Tom Berenger is a rich American who wants to bury the field under concrete and build a road. Audiences are less likely to choose sides than flee from the overacting of Harris and John Hurt as his dimwitted crony. Sometimes gorgeous scenery is just not enough.