country 1984 movie review

The opening moments of "Country" show a woman frying hamburgers and wrapping them up and sending them out to her men, working in the fields. The movie is using visuals to announce its intentions: It wants to observe the lives of its characters at the level of daily detail and routine, and to avoid pulling back into "Big Country" cliché shots. It succeeds. This movie observes ordinary American lives carefully, and passionately. The family lives on a farm in Iowa. Times are hard, and times are now. This isn't a movie about symbolic farmers living in some colorful American past. It is about the farm policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations, and how the movie believes that those policies are resulting in the destruction of family farms. It has been so long since I've seen a Hollywood film with specific political beliefs that a funny thing happened: The movie's anger moved me as much as its story.

The story is pretty moving, too. We meet the members of the Ivy family: Jewell Ivy ( Jessica Lange ), the farm wife; her husband, Gil ( Sam Shepard ); her father, Otis ( Wilford Brimley ); and the three children, especially Carlisle (Levi L. Knebel), the son who knows enough about farming to know when his father has given up. The movie begins at the time of last year's harvest. Some nasty weather has destroyed part of the yield. The Ivys are behind on their FHA loan. Ordinarily, that would be no tragedy; farming is cyclical and there are good years and bad years, and eventually they'll catch up with the loan. But this year is different. An FHA regional administrator, acting on orders from Washington, instructs his people to enforce all loans strictly, and to foreclose when necessary. He uses red ink to write his recommendation on the Ivys' loan file: Move toward voluntary liquidation. Since there is no way the loan can be paid off, the Ivys will lose the land that Jewell's family has farmed for one hundred years. The farm agent helpfully supplies the name of an auctioneer.

All of this sounds just a little like the dire opening chapters of a story by Horatio Alger, but the movie never feels dogmatic or forced because "Country" is so clearly the particular story of these people and the way they respond. Old Otis is angry at his son-in-law for losing the farm. Jewell defends her husband, but he goes into town to drink away his impotent rage. There are loud fights far into the night in a house that had been peaceful. The boy asks, "Would somebody mind telling me what's going on around here?" The movie's strongest passages deal with Jewell's attempts to enlist her neighbors in a stand against the government. The most touching scenes, though, are the ones showing how abstract economic policies cause specific human suffering, cause lives to be interrupted, and families to be torn apart, all in the name of the balance sheet. "Country" is as political, as unforgiving, as " The Grapes of Wrath ."

The movie has, unfortunately, one important area of weakness, in the way it handles the character of Gil (Shepard). At the beginning we have no reason to doubt that he is a good farmer. Later, the movie raises questions about that assumption, and never clearly answers them. Gil starts drinking heavily, and lays a hand on his son, and leaves the farm altogether for several days. The local farm agent tells him, point blank, that he's a drunk and a bad farmer. Well, is he? In an affecting scene where Gil returns and asks for the understanding of his family, his drinking is not mentioned. It's good that the movie tries to make the character more complex and interesting -- not such a noble hero -- but if he really is a drunk and a bad farmer, then maybe that's why he's behind on the loan. The movie shouldn't raise the possibility without dealing with it.

In a movie with the power of "Country," I can live with a problem like that because there are so many other good things. The performances are so true you feel this really is a family; we expect the quality of the acting by Lange, Shepard, and gruff old Brimley, but the surprise is Levi L. Knebel, as the son. He is so stubborn and so vulnerable, so filled with his sense of right when he tells his father what's being done wrong, that he brings the movie an almost documentary quality; this isn't acting, we feel, but eavesdropping.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Richard Pearce

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Gilbert Ivy and his wife Jewell are farmers. They seem to be working against the odds, producing no financial surplus. Gilbert has lost hope of ever becoming prosperous, but his wife decides... Read all Gilbert Ivy and his wife Jewell are farmers. They seem to be working against the odds, producing no financial surplus. Gilbert has lost hope of ever becoming prosperous, but his wife decides to fight for her family. Gilbert Ivy and his wife Jewell are farmers. They seem to be working against the odds, producing no financial surplus. Gilbert has lost hope of ever becoming prosperous, but his wife decides to fight for her family.

• Richard Pearce
• William D. Wittliff
• Jessica Lange
• Sam Shepard
• Wilford Brimley
• 16 User reviews
• 13 Critic reviews
• 1 win & 3 nominations total

Top cast 37

• Tom McMullen
• Marlene Ivy
• (as Therese' Graham)
• Carlisle Ivy
• Arlon Brewer

• Louise Brewer
• Fordyce, FHA Man
• Grain Elevator Operator
• (as Robert Somers)
• Semi Driver
• (as Frank Noel Jr.)
• (as Rev. Warren Duit)
• Bank Officer, Jim
• (as James Harrell)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Second theatrical feature film release from then new Walt Disney Pictures' new studio branding of Touchstone Films. The first had been Splash (1984) which had debuted earlier in 1984 - the same year that 'Country' premiered. The name was later re-branded to Touchstone Pictures in 1987.
• Goofs The Ivy family are shown watching a University of Iowa football game after Sunday church services. college football is played on Saturdays.

Tom McMullen : Listen, you owe the money, nobody forced you to borrow it.

• Connections Featured in At the Movies: Teachers/Country/The Brother from Another Planet/Old Enough (1984)
• Soundtracks Home Written by George Winston

User reviews 16

• How long is Country? Powered by Alexa
• September 29, 1984 (United States)
• United States
• Cosechas de ira
• Black Hawk County, Iowa, USA (locations: Readlyn and Waterloo)
• Touchstone Films
• Touchstone Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $10,000,000 (estimated)
• Sep 30, 1984
• Runtime 1 hour 45 minutes

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COUNTRY (1984) – Blu-ray Review

Jessica Lange And Sam Shepard Star In Heartland Drama Showing Rural Struggles In The 1980s

DIRECTED BY RICHARD PEARCE

STREET DATE: AUGUST 28 TH , 2018

Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard co-star as Jewell and Gil Ivy, Iowa farmers and parents of two struggling to keep their homestead, corn acreage, and livestock viable though natural disaster, a tightening produce market, and the larger collapse of federal farm assistance programs. Opening on a nighttime harvest in which a tornado unexpectedly rips a terrifying path of destruction over air-lifted farm equipment and swirling corn (a practical effects sequence with all the more impact for occurring within the visual realm of frightening probability), the somber note of sudden upheaval and swift reversal struck in this establishing scene reverberates through the financial pressures, callous government treatment, and ultimately the community and family tensions to follow. As their livelihood is threatened, the individual responses of Gil, Jewell, and her father, Otis (Wilford Brimley), to policies and procedures designed seemingly to separate dedicated family farmers from their land detail the harsh new realities of rural American survival.

Welcome to the 1980s. As a viewer whose first movie-going experiences date roughly to the time of Country ’s release, the milieu of long, dusty roads, rusty pickup trucks, faded flannel jackets, and dimly-lit bars seem familiar in the way affluent suburbs, noisy malls, stone-washed jeans, and flashy arcades seemed restricted mainly to the movies. Far from the candy-colored funscape pop culture of the period traded on, most younger moviegoers staring up at sixteenth-birthday shenanigans lived well outside the gated-like communities shown in John Hughes’s Shermer, Illinois. Gil and Jewell’s teenage son Carlisle (Levi L. Knebel) may listen to tantalizingly strong, possibly New Wave-inflected beats on his Walkman in one mid-film scene, but such is purely a moment’s reprieve from the milking chores and barnyard clean-up that fill his working hours daily.

At its heart of hard realism, Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange’s real-life chemistry infuses the drama with a timeless quality that never feels less than emotionally true. As Gil, the late Sam Shepard’s natural screen strength and shyness remain a potent combination, hearkening favorably back to the all-American, Lincolnian qualities of masculinity once embodied by Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda, and his character’s gradual, alcoholic retreat from loans, liens, and loss becomes all the more tragic as he is essentially robbed of the power to respond to those unforeseen challenges. Gil’s outrage is directed within, and his once easy-gong temperament is besieged by self-doubt and misdirected anger, culminating in a drunken, physical attack on his own son and temporary banishment from the home. Sam Shepard’s portrayal is frankly fearless in uprooting the age-old myth of the strong, silent male.

Rather, it is left to Jessica Lange’s Jewell to hold the farm and family together, and it is interesting to note the shift in the power dynamic both in the business and domestic spheres at the time of Country ’s release. Introduced literally digging up and bodily dragging out her son Carlisle from the tornado-heaped mound of corn he is buried under, Country signals early that this remarkably strong woman will bear the brunt of the film’s drama. As the film’s co-producer, with screenwriter William D. Witliff, Lange’s Jewell, both as a character and in the actress’s portrayal, is the film’s true hero, and whether preparing hamburgers in the film’s opening scene, rallying her neighbors to action in the film’s climactically exciting and very ‘80s montage sequence, or leading a Norma Rae (1979)-like chant against the mortgage bankers and auctioneers at its stirring conclusion, Country is Lange’s movie from beginning to end.

Director Richard Pearce has one other highly regarded rural drama to his credit, 1979’s Heartland , so it is tempting to assume that he came by his resistance to the mild run of high-concept comedies and low-stakes action thrillers with which the mid-1980s were glutted quite honestly. And while the feel-good formula of perseverance and reward certainly holds true by film’s end, with the postscript coda of the FHA’s injustices towards family farm loans apparently “addressed”, the aforementioned montage sequence, building towards stirring “triumph” at the end, is balanced by the film’s darker thematic elements and its realistic treatment of both the challenges small family farmers face and the unreservedly grim nature of those challenges. Life looks hard when measured by corn tonnage or viewed down unpaved, gravelly roads that lead nowhere, and the brutal reality conveyed by Country is that once separated from their family farms – in essence, robbing the heart from the Heartland – these small family farmers will have no place to go.

Kino Lorber commentator Lee Gambin muses on many of the issues raised politically and era-historically by Country ’s 1984 release and reception, contextualizing the film with other thematically contemporary rural dramas like Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart and Mark Rydell’s The River (both also 1984). Like Country , Places in the Heart , with Sally Field, and The River , with Sissy Spacek, feature strong female protagonists preserving a way of life threatened by forces both natural and unnatural, from outside the larger community and from within the family itself. In the current cultural and political context, perhaps a triple-bill of truly all-American and female-centric artistic populism is in order – countering a commonly accepted view that entertainment of the 1980s eschewed socially progressive content – to remind and empower a new generation of viewers. Fortunately, Kino Lorber’s timely and visually-accomplished Blu-ray release has arrived to provide a suitably strong portion of that now-more-than-ever viewing need.

The images used in this review are credited to DVDBeaver and are taken directly from Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release.

Kino Lorber, 109 min., PG, DVD: $14.99, Blu-ray: $29.99 Volume 33, Issue 6

by Sean Axmaker

October 24, 2018

Rating: 3 of 5

Jessica Lange produced and starred in this 1984 rural drama centered on the plight of American farms in the 1980s, as food prices dropped, farmers floundered in debt, and the FHA foreclosed on family farms all over the country. Lange plays Jewell Ivy, a wife and mother who runs an Iowa farm that has been in her family for generations along with her husband Gil (Sam Shepard), father Otis (Wilford Brimley), and teenage son Carlisle (Levi L. Knebel). At the government’s urging, they took out loans to expand their family spread, but years of falling grain prices have left them financially farther behind, and when a tornado destroys much of their corn crop (and almost kills one of them in the dramatic opening scene), their loan is abruptly called in, which leaves the family no viable options. Jewell is the one who not only holds things together but also organizes the resistance to the foreclosure while Gil retreats into drink as he sees everything slip away. Director Richard Pearce (Heartland) displays his gift for capturing the realism of rural settings and people facing difficult circumstances in this provocative drama that wears its themes on its sleeve and mythologizes family farming but also gives voice to the anxieties of rural America during an era of transformation into agribusiness. Extras include audio commentary by film historian Lee Gambin. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)

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As of March 2022, Video Librarian has changed from a four-star rating system to a five-star one. This change allows our reviewers to have a wider range of critical viewpoints, as well as to synchronize with Google’s rating structure. This change affects all reviews from March 2022 onwards. All reviews from before this period will still retain their original rating. Future film submissions will be considered our new 1-5 star criteria.

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Release details.

• Duration: 109 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Richard Pearce
• Screenwriter: William Wittliff
• Jessica Lange
• Sam Shepard
• Wilford Brimley
• Therese Graham
• Levi L Knebel

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