Run the Wild Fields (2000)

Pleasant Surprise

I usually come to Hallmark movies with high hopes but expectations that they'll be dashed. This is one Hallmark movie that I wanted to run out an buy once I saw. It's well-written and poetic. I would definitely recommend it. July 22, 2006

Wonderful, heartfelt movie about life and love

I finished watching this movie last night and I have to say it is an absolutely lovely film. The story line may have been attempted by other film makers...but Run the Wild Fields really is a winner. Exceptional portrayals by Joanne Walley, Sean Patrick Flanery and Alexa Vega.

Run the Wild Fields is set during WWII. Ruby Miller(Joanne Walley) and her daughter Pug(Alexa Vega)are awaiting the return of Frank(husband and father) from the Pacific battle front.

Three years go by and no word from Frank. Ruby and Pug's hopes for Frank's safe return, is all that have kept them going for three years. Then one day Pug happens across an injured and mysterious drifter named Tom Walker(Sean Patrick Flanery).

They help Tom recover from his wounds and in a series of events he ends up working on their farm.

Tom and Pug's relationship grows from Pug's insatiable curiosity about Tom's mysterious past...into a father daughter type of relationship. Also in the process Ruby and Tom form a wife and husband dynamic.

Throughout the movie, details of Tom's mysterious past gets leaked out.

Alas a letter from Frank arrives saying he is safe and on is way home. Beautiful and touching heart ache ensues...yet this movie leaves the viewer with a sense that every thing works out as it needs to.

July 3, 2006

Awesome Movie!! Really Great

This has got to be one of my favorite movies. It is a sweet tale of a family in the ww2 period. A lady name Ruby and her daughter, Opal. Ruby's husband has been missing in action for three years, when a man named Tom comes and startes to work for her and fix up the long out of repare farm.It is a great story. December 5, 2005

an atypical tale of forbidden love...

Run the Wild Fields is about a woman[Whalley] whose husband is gone, fighting in WWII, and has been missing in action for some time. She's bringing up her daughter by herself on the family farm, when a mysterious stranger shows up and enters their lives. This is a familiar premise, the drama set before us being: 1.what will we learn about the stranger, and 2. how will the stranger affect his hosts? And of course, in a typical Hollywood film, you expect lust-driven sparks to fly.

Yes, things do happen, but not what you might expect. Maybe this particular story is a useful corrective, in its own way, to Adrian Lyne-style melodramatic excesseses, of which you certainly can't accuse the makers of this picture. Still the kid [Alex Vega] is pretty good, in what could've been a treacly, insuffrably sweet role. The adults are ok too.

a slight revision 9/2005: I first reviewed this in 2004. I saw RTWF a 2nd time recently, and it grows on you-- still no melodrama, but Joanne Whalley and Sean Patrick Flanery are better as the romantic leads than I first allowed for. Both performances have a sort of antidramatic calm about them-- as if the characters simply "are," and you have to go to them, watching perhaps a bit more intently for shadings and nuance than you might be accustomed to, participating in the unfolding of the narrative, as it were.

I guess, over the years, I've grown accustomed to allowing for that sort of minimalism in Asian and European pictures, but not American ones. February 12, 2004

Hidden Treasure

I love buying movies that no one had heard of, just by reading the box. This one was a true find. Very sweet hidden love story and an all around wonderful movie. March 25, 2001

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