Mel Gibson is living dangerously again here, although the evils that face him in this back-to-the-land drama are drought, flooding and the efforts of bad guy Scott Glenn to drive him off his farm.

Sissy Spacek follows along the trail blazed by Sally Field and Jessica Lange as the wife who tends the farm (and nearly loses her life in a tractor accident which provides the film's most agonising scene) when her man is forced to go away to earn money - as a "scab" at a striking steel works.

The combination of Gibson and Spacek should have been dynamite but, though both are good, a unifying element between them seems to be missing, so that the scene-stealers are little Becky Jo Lynch as their daughter, and Glenn, coming on like a younger James Coburn as Spacek's high-school beau, now bent on flooding the valley in which he grew up.

The ending may choke you up a bit and reveals that director Mark Rydell - however practical his view of the modern Mid West may be - is a sentimentalist at heart.