Product Details

• Actors: Albert Finney, Jill Clayburgh, Kathryn Erbe, Kyle MacLachlan, Piper Laurie
• Directors: Bruce Beresford
• Writers: Alfred Uhry, Josephine Humphreys
• Producers: David Brown, Gary Daigler, Lili Fini Zanuck, Richard D. Zanuck
• Format: NTSC
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
• VHS Release Date: February 15, 1994
• Run Time: 105 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00000694N
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #113,258 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Bruce Beresford's movie is a coming-of-age story about a white teen-ager, Lucille Odom (Kathryn Erbe), living in Charleston, South Carolina. The crises that force her to grow up and figure out who she is happen at a rather leisurely pace-the poky, gone-fishin' tempo that writers and filmmakers tend to drift into when they set up south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Beresford and his team (many of whom worked on "Driving Miss Daisy") know the territory well. Maybe too well: there's something practiced about the movie's Southernness. The cast includes Albert Finney, Piper Laurie, Suzy Amis, Kyle MacLachlan, Alfre Woodard, Ethan Hawke, and Jill Clayburgh; these appealing actors do their best to keep the picture ambling along, from the standard-issue domestic crisis it begins with to its contentedly undramatic resolution. (Amis, as Lucille's flamboyant older sister, is the standout.) The movie, like the Josephine Humphreys novel that it's based on, is gentle and quirky and suspiciously ingratiating; it's so bent on charming us that it refuses to grow up, to become much of anything. Its modesty preens. Screenplay by Alfred Uhry; cinematography by Peter James. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Meandering Southern tale touches the heart., April 27, 2000

By 

John Cobb (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rich in Love [VHS] (VHS Tape)

As her family begins to unravel, young Lucille Odom (Kathryn Erbe) enburdens herself with the job of holding the whole deal together, including a casual father (Albert Finney) and a wild older sister (Suzi Amis).

Erbe, a Chicagoan who does far too much work on stage and too little on film (What About Bob?), is wonderful, Finney, brilliant. The story does tend to wander, and each of the new characters that crosses our path (including Piper Laurie and Alfre Woodard) tend to show us as many weaknesses as strengths. Such is the honesty of the tale.

The Southern (Charleston?) setting is wonderfully comfortable-we ride the visual images as much as the heartfelt characters. The whole thing has a Hallmark Hall of Fame feeling---with not the perfunctory payoff in the end

I like this film very much.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Star Turn For Albert Finney, June 20, 2005

By 

Gregor von Kallahann - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rich in Love [VHS] (VHS Tape)

RICH IN LOVE boasts a great ensemble cast, but it's probably not a disservice to the other actors in this 1993 heartwarmer to say that the film BELONGS to Albert Finney. To say nothing of the fact that his is absolutely the best Southern accent of any of the non-(US)Southern born actors in the film. What is it about the Brits ready mastery of Dixiespeak anyway? OK, OK, aside from Albert Finney in this movie, I can actually only think of Vivien Leigh's flawless turn as Miz Scarlett in 1939.

So maybe it has more to do with being a huge talent than with one's nationality. Still such solid performers as Piper Laurie and Jill Clayburgh kind of wander in and out of their accents here. Finney, however, is just about perfection here. And not just linguistically. He inhabits his role as the chronically perplexed retiree Warren Odom, who is attempting make sense of his wife's sudden abandonment of him and his high school aged daughter (Kathryn Erbe). More oblivious than truly insensitive, he ultimately has to come to terms with the fact that although he and his wife still love each other in their way, after 27 years, they can no longer live together.

Erbe also turns in a remarkable performance--especially considering that the actress, who was in her mid-twenties at the time the film was made, so convincingly plays a precocious high school senior. Also impressive is the film's one true Southerner, Suzy Amis as her impetuous newly wed (and ambivalently pregnant) sister. It's a lovingly dysfunctional Southern family, one that ultimately comes together in its clumsy, lopsided way. No easy answers here, but everybody grows up a little bit over the course of the film's two hours. And maybe that's the best you can hope for.

RICH IN LOVE doesn't make any grandiose statements, and that's all to the good. It's one of those "little movies" that somehow manages to reveal a few great truths about the human condition. And it offers a great performance by Albert Finney. Coincidentally, I recently also caught his follow-up film, THE BROWNING VERSION, as well. It's difficult to imagine two more divergent roles than the garrulous Southerner he plays here and the reserved English Classics teacher he portrayed in the latter film. He has a remarkable range, one that goes beyond a mere facility in mastering accents. His is a much deeper mastery indeed.

Nominated five times for an Academy Award, Finney has never won. His last nomination was in 2000 for a solid but certainly not stellar turn in ERIN BROCKOVICH. I guess neither RICH IN LOVE nor THE BROWNING VERSION were big enough to merit the Academy's attention, but his work in both those films was infinitely more subtle, and at the same time more commanding, than his role as Julia Roberts' boss in that megahit.

And people ask me why I don't take the Oscars seriously.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent! Excellent! Bravo!!!, September 29, 2000

By 

"duchessholly12" (Orange Park, Florida, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rich in Love [VHS] (VHS Tape)

I love this film!! A great southern film-wonderful acting, and story is great. I am quirky southern character too!!!:)