Stage director Scott Elliott had his hands full with this story, and while it has its moments, overall his choices didn't really add up to a winner. Some people have sleighted this movie because of how "quickly" the trial is taken care of near the end, but in fact the book is the same way, and for good reason: the trial is not what the story is about. Unfortunately, as with so many book-to-film translations, the poetry of the prose and thus some of the deeper meanings are lost. Some of the changes between the film and the book work effectively to condense dozens of pages into one idea (the "wall of baby pictures" in the jail helps quickly convey Alice's changing relationship with her unit mates), but other changes only serve to hammer home a point that was made with much more subtlety in the book. (Did we really need angry graffiti on the side of the Goodwin's house? WE GET IT -- the town didn't like them!) Pat Metheny's original soundtrack was beautifully melodic, as he usually is, but it didn't fit in with the feel of the movie, and surprisingly, it didn't have much of the Midwest sensibilities one would expect from a composer from Missouri. Nonetheless, this movie will at least be worth a video rental, especially if you are a Sigourney Weaver fan and want to see her doing something other than an _Alien_ pic. While it took me awhile to warm to it, her portrayal of Alice in the end is stunning, and much more complex than anything else in this movie.
