A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998)

So true to life it made me cry. Exactly how I grew up, "expatriate" and all. The acting and direction and locations were perfect in every way, and this film takes a number of viewings to "see it all." Excellent recommendations all around.

***May Contain Spoilers***I'm still not sure if I liked this movie or not, but I definitely found its form interesting. I kept wondering throughout just where the heck this movie was going. It seemed to go off on various tangents, building mini-dramas, only to drop them at the last minute, leaving the viewer just hanging. At first it seemed to be building a story around little Billie's adoption then it backed away. Then it insinuated a drama based around Channe's encounter with the neighbor boy and then dropped it. It continued this pattern through Candida's relationship, Channe's early promiscuity, and Marcella's growing drinking problem. All leading up to Bill's death...which is treated in the same anti-dramatic style. It seems to me that the whole point of the movie was to experiment using an anti-dramatic form and style where very dramatic episodes are abandoned just before the viewer enters the realm of real feeling.

I was laying around one day flipping through the channels and came upon this movie and have watched it several times since. Leelee Sobieski proved to be a great actress starring with veterans Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey. Anthony Roth Constanzo gave such a stunning performance you'll wonder why this is his only film to date. I'm not sure the novel would keep my attention as the film did but if you're chilling out at home on a rainy day it's worth checking out.

I was disappointed in this movie, because I thought it had great potential: Merchant/Ivory, good cast and so on. The film suffers from dealing with too broad a sweep of time. Having to cover so many incidents in the life of one family, one gets a series of incomplete gesture drawings instead of a rich oil painting focussed on one or two subjects.I found that the characters never engaged me emotionally. The film never really let me into their world so that I really cared about them and what happened to them. So many plot threads were left undeveloped, and most of the emotionally engaging scenes of conflict were left out of the script. As an example, as Charlotte-Anne (Leelee Sobieski) develops into a young woman, she is frustrated as the family housekeeper/nanny continues to come into her room without knocking. The first time it happens, she yells at the nanny. Later in the film, she talks to her father about what is apparently a continuing problem. But we never get the logical scene where Charlotte-Anne confronts her nanny (which could have been played so many ways, and given such shading to Sobieski's character). Then, this thread with the nanny is simply left hanging. Emotions are stated as facts, they aren't really experienced in this film.