Ron Howard names the most misunderstood movie of his career: “Critics hit us hard”
Some filmmakers spend their entire careers subverting expectations, upending conventions, and trying to paint cinema in new colours that audiences have never seen before. Ron Howard is most definitely not one of those filmmakers, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming one of the industry’s most successful.
After all, he’s the 11th highest-grossing director in cinema history, so it’s clear that Howard has amassed a back catalogue of crowd-pleasing hits. He’s also one of Hollywood’s safest and most versatile pair of hands, spending his decades as an in-demand name by seemingly checking off as many different genres as possible, even if the results have been as inconsistent as the scattershot approach would suggest.
Still, he’s won Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, is rapidly closing in on a cumulative box office haul of $5 billion, and he’s almost 50 years deep into his secondary career. Not every film is destined for success, but Howard remains disappointed that one of his efforts didn’t get the credit he thought it deserved.
To be fair, it wasn’t exactly a flop. The picture in question earned almost $140 million in ticket sales back in 1992, even if it did land on the Razzies shortlist for ‘Worst Original Song’. Then again, most of the buzz swirling around Far and Away was the re-teaming of A-list leads and married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, which overshadowed everything else.
A sweeping romantic epic featuring two superstars deploying horrendous Irish accents, Far and Away never felt sure of what kind of movie it wanted to be. Was it a grandiose twist on the western? A love story set against the backdrop of change? An intentionally old-fashioned melodrama? It was all of the above at once and didn’t pull any of them off to a satisfying degree.
“I mean, if anything, it was misunderstood because it was a kind of 1930s romantic comedy,” Howard clarified to Charlie Rose. “It was almost a screwball kind of romp set in, you know, the 1880s. She could handle the emotional moments, and she was funny. And she’s an incredibly hard worker. I knew then that she was going to be great. I kept saying she’s going to be Katherine Hepburn or something.”
As it turned out, Howard was attempting to make Far and Away a homage to the ‘Golden Age’ screwball caper, albeit set half a century further in the past. That wasn’t obvious from watching it, with the film lacking in any personality, identity, or memorable traits other than the shitty accents and a signature scene of Cruise sprinting as fast as he can because that’s what he does.
“It was disappointing,” Howard reflected. “Critics hit us hard. It was an odd movie to market.” That might be because the director didn’t make it clear what he wanted it to be, and also the fact it wasn’t very good.
