ABSTRACT
Ron Howard’s Far and Away begins with drunken Irish men telling folk tales in a tavern before we see peasants confront their landlord Daniel Christie (Robert Prosky) and his family as they ride through the local village in late-nineteenthcentury Ireland. Although the film adheres to the traditional American immigration story whereby immigrants leave the old country for the United States searching for better opportunities, it spends significant time in Ireland to illustrate historic class and gender conflicts and how they limited the dreams of its principal characters, Joseph Donnelly (Tom Cruise) and Shannon Christie (Nicole Kidman). Yet, the film diverges from the traditional immigration narrative in two significant ways even as it reinforces it: firstly, Joseph and Shannon are not propelled to leave Ireland because of the devastating famine that forced the first major wave of Irish emigration in the 1840s; second, it is not the story of Europeans becoming American as much as Europeans already possessing American values in the old country ultimately able to practice them once they move to the United States. In Ireland, Joseph already exhibits a spirit of Jeffersonian individualism even though he is a frustrated renter dependent upon the mercy and good graces of his landlord, and Shannon has adopted habits of a modern American woman as she tries to free herself from the patriarchal traditions of her Irish aristocratic family.
