Themes: Miscarriage of Justice, Death of a Child, Women's Friendship
Main Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Julianne Moore, David Strathairn, Ron Lea, Arliss Howard
Release Year: 1999
Country: US
Run Time: 125 minutes
Plot
In this contemporary drama, Sigourney Weaver plays a woman out of her element and at the end of her rope. Alice Goodwin is a wife and mother who finds that the pressures of her life are starting to become more than she can bear. Alice works part-time as a school nurse while her husband Howard (David Strathairn) runs the family farm; they both look after their two daughters. Alice, who wasn't raised in farm country, still feels like an outsider, and she embraces a cynical, sarcastic humor as a defense mechanism. Alice's only real friends in town are Dan and Theresa Collins (Ron Lea and Julianne Moore), who live nearby and often babysit Alice's kids; Alice does the same for the Collins children as well. One day, while watching Theresa's two-year-old daughter Lizzie, Alice has to step away for a few minutes, and she returns to discover Lizzie has fallen into a pond near the house; the child falls into a coma and dies several days later. Lizzie's death puts a permanent wedge between Alice and Theresa, and most people in the community believe Alice is to blame for the girl's death. Any support she might have had is driven away when Robbie (Marc Donato), a boy who lives nearby, claims Alice molested him. Alice is sent to jail while awaiting trial, and Howard (who can't afford her $100,000 bail) must watch over their daughters and keep house by himself as he tries to keep the farm afloat. As Alice falls into a deep depression behind bars, Howard and Theresa begin edging into a romance. Based on the best-selling novel by Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World was adapted for the screen by Peter Hedges and Polly Platt and director Scott Elliott. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
This awkward and truncated adaptation of Jane Hamilton's 1994 best-seller nonetheless boasts fine performances from David Strathairn, Julianne Moore, and Sigourney Weaver -- each actor doing what he or she does best. Weaver's turn as the urban refugee turned rural housewife falsely accused of sexual molestation and murder recalls her strong yet on-the-edge characters in both Death and the Maiden and the Alien films. Moore takes her usual luminosity to grief-ravaged yet defiant extremes as the woman whose child drowns on her best friend's watch. Strathairn plays a boxed-in yet fundamentally decent family man in a role not so different from the one he played in Limbo. Throw in a white-trash cameo from the always watchable Chloe Sevigny and you've got a wonderful cast in search of a great script. Unfortunately, they don't find it here as production designer and occasional screenwriter Polly Platt, working with What's Eating Gilbert Grape alumnus Peter Hedges, flips the picture back and forth from small-town reverie to woman-on-the-verge histrionics to courtroom melodrama and prison exploitation. By the time rookie director Scott Elliott cycles back to his final examination of marriage, friendship, and their mutual discontents, the film may have exhausted viewers looking for a more traditional arc. Nevertheless, for those who can follow its sometimes difficult shifts in plot and tone, Map of the World offers up great actors exploring weighty issues with gravity and poise. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
