Susan Granger's review of "A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES" (October Films)
Kaylie Jones writes about what she knows. In this fictionalized autobiography, the daughter of James Jones, who wrote "From Here to Eternity y" and "The Thin Red Line," details what it was like to grow up bilingual in the late '60s and '70s in Paris, inhabiting two disparate cultures yet not totally comfortable in either. Her expatriate parents were obviously conflicted about America and France, and they passed that ambivalence on to their children. There's the adolescent girl (Leelee Sobieski), her novelist father (Kris Kristofferson), free-spirited mother (Barbara Hershey), and adopted French brother (Jesse Bradford). Plus her best friend (Anthony Roth Costanzo), an artistic, sensitive soul who sings opera in a lilting soprano. Then, when her father's heart disease propels a move to Long Island, there's a whole new set of emotional conflicts as she comes-of-age in a sexually liberal, unrepressed home. Curiously, it's the idiosyn= cratic, anecdotal story, adapted by James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,not the acting performances, that distinguishes this Merchant-Ivory film. Kaylie Jones's enduring, unbridled homage to the memory of her father presents him as a tender, doting, understanding paragon of loving, paternal qualities. James Jones becomes the father every girl wishes she had. And cinematographer Jean-Marc Fabre captures this wistful, nostalgic mood on film. The conclusion, however, is enigmatic and problematic; given her = disturbed brother's troubled background, it's just not credible that he would not read his mother's diary which his sister holds for him. Nevertheless, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is a subtle, delicately etched, poignant 7, a devoted "Daddy Dearest" for the art house crowd.
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