Herald rating: * * * *
Running time: 124 mins
Rental: From today
Review: Ewan McDonald
The usual suspects of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are behind the cameras with an unexpected cast in front. Channe (Leelee Sobieski) and her family live in Paris in the 60s.
Her father, Bill Willis
(Kris Kristofferson), is a famous American novelist; he and his wife, Marcella (Barbara Hershey), swim with the expatriate community.
Channe and her adopted brother Benoit/Billy (Jesse Bradford) go to a school where the students come from wildly different backgrounds.
Sounds like a fairytale childhood but it's based on fact. The source was a novel by Kaylie Jones, whose father, James Jones, wrote From Here To Eternity and The Thin Red Line, lived in Paris, drank a lot and had heart problems. And fairytales don't always end happily ever after.
As the children become teenagers, the father's health leads the family back to North Carolina, where the children are once again outsiders. Billy learns the circumstances of his adoption; Channe responds by drinking and becoming promiscuous. What does she have to cling to? Her father's love.
A Soldier's Daughter ... is not a handbook for bringing up teenagers but there's more than enough hope in this story of what families do right and wrong to recommend it.
