| Director | Jocelyn Moorhouse |
|---|---|
| Genre | drama film |
| Runtime | 101 min |
| Country | United States |
| Budget | $28 million |
| Box office | $7.9 million |
Larry Cook, a prosperous farmer in Iowa, decides to retire and split his acres of land among his three daughters, Ginny, Rose and Caroline. Ginny and Rose happily accept the lucrative agreement to live and work on the farm but Caroline abandons farming for a law career in Des Moines and refuses to take part in the deal.
Larry is consumed with rage and rejects Caroline, leaving Rose and Ginny to go about running the farm with their husbands. However, as Larry loses touch with farming life, he begins to lose touch with reality, and his painful descent into senility leaves him bitterly opposed to his daughters' ways of running the farm.
As she struggles to maintain the farm, Ginny encounters a rift in her relationship with Rose, who reveals that Larry had sexually abused her when she was a child, and insists that he had done the same thing to Ginny. The two women also develop a strong extra-marital attachment to Jess, the handsome son of a neighboring farmer who is loyal to Larry.
Paranoid and disillusioned, Larry decides to sue Rose and Ginny in an effort to regain his patriarchal control, and seeks Caroline's help. The lawsuit divides the family forever, leaving Rose and Ginny to suffer alone while realizing painful truths about their childhood. As Rose and Ginny discover their own individual strengths in the face of adversity, they learn how to survive on their own, without the protection of the farm and the suffocating presence of their father.