Surviving In A New World

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: FAR AND AWAY

DIRECTOR: RON HOWARD

WRITER: BOB DOLMAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Irish immigrants come to 19th century America and come of age in epic style.

FAR AND AWAY IS ALMOST AN OXYmoron. It is, to use two words that rarely rub shoulders, a genial epic. Big historical movies usually revolve around great figures (Gandhi, T.E. Lawrence) or great historical moments (the Russian Revolution, the parting of the Red Sea), and they always resonate with instructive messages for the modern audience (as in Dances with Wolves).

But Ron Howard's film tells the simple tale of a spunky, apparently mismatched Irish couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who come to the U.S. at the end of the 19th century and come of age in the process. He's Joseph, a tenant farmer whose family is driven off its picturesque corner of the Ould Sod by the cruel agents of an absentee landlord. She's Shannon, the landlord's daughter, who falls in love with Joseph at first sight, even though he turns up on her father's estate, ancient rifle in hand, to take vengeance.

Obviously they are made for each other, class distinctions be damned. And the two actors (who are married in real life) are awfully good together. He's stubborn, hot tempered and a survivor; she's all high spirits and willfulness, and they both know how to find the comic side of those traits, because, starry glamour aside, they are resourceful actors. Determined to avoid an arranged marriage to Stephen (Thomas Gibson), the very steward who is the source of Joseph's troubles, Shannon runs away to America, taking Joseph along as her servant.

Their dream is free land, but before they can attain it -- in the Oklahoma land rush that is the movie's smashing climax -- they must endure a long, penniless passage in the Boston slums, where they live as brother and sister in a rented whorehouse room. They're the only residents unable to assuage their sexual itch, and, madly sublimating, Joseph becomes a bareknuckle boxer in a sporting club. It is here, at its center, that Far and Away takes its biggest chances, for this section is dark and claustrophobic and concludes melodramatically with Shannon near death and Joseph carrying her through a blizzard seeking help.

Somehow it works, in part because of the way director Howard keeps his crowded frames abustle with activity, in part because of the sheer indomitability with which his leading characters are endowed by the actors and by writer Dolman, but mostly because the movie takes enlivening chances with its material: precognitive dreams, for example, and near death out-of-body experiences. Flirtations with magic realism are not at all what we expect to find in epic cinema.

But Howard, whose best work (Splash and Cocoon) has been fantastical, uses these devices unpretentiously. He's not a man who likes to force his effects. There are times when one wishes he did push his -- and our -- emotions just a little harder and wind the story's suspense just a little tighter. He needs, perhaps, to be a little less self-effacing as a director, especially with a film like this, which was inspired by his own ancestors' immigrant experiences and clearly means a great deal to him. On the other hand, a firm sense of human scale is no small virtue in such a project, and neither is a good sense of humor, which keeps reminding us that the grandeur of what American immigration achieved historically was created out of less-than-grand, occasionally absurd human motives.