Far and Away

Originally published on social media on March 16th, 2022

Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day and being Irish, my family and I get really excited for this holiday each year! In honor of this holiday, I will be posting 3 film reviews/recommendations that share Irish stories…maybe if you’re lucky, I’ll post 4! With that being said, let’s begin with Far and Away.

Far and Away is an Irish immigrant story that takes place around 1893! This was a time when many Irish people were immigrating to the US in hopes of a brighter future. During this time, the Irish economy was dominated by British absentee landlords. As this film shows, the common Irishman was treated very unfairly and lacked any opportunity to prosper nevertheless survive. It should also be mentioned that it was only 50 years before that Irish Catholics were finally freed from the Britain laws that denied them the right to worship, vote, speak their language, and to own land, guns, and horses. Ah there’s another thing to add onto my list of things I never learned in my AP history classes. Who says you can’t learn while writing film reviews? I did learn a little bit about the experience of being an Irish immigrant in school. Wanna learn about that experience?
Watch this film!

Scenery plays an important role in story telling, and this film has both the gorgeous Irish scenery and the unfortunate living situation for immigrants during this time.

This film not only teaches history, but is a lovely romance! How could it not be with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (during the beginning of their marriage)? They are both good actors and honestly, I think this film is best of both their careers!

This isn’t a just a historical romance, but it has plenty of relevant action sequences. In this way, this is a film that I believe anyone could enjoy! Parents do be aware that this is PG-13 . While the PG-13 standard has significantly become more inappropriate in the last 10 years or so, I would still recommend proceeding with caution.