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BY JAMES McQUILLEN |
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A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries Rated R Opens Friday, Sept. 25 Director James Ivory is just half of the collaboration noted for such films as A Room with a View and Remains of the Day, though he has for so long been associated with producer Ismail Merchant that one might assume Merchant to be his first name. He is known for period pictures of minimal action, films that combine the attenuated narrative sense of Hal Hartley with the tastefulness and attention to detail of David Lean. More than most filmmakers, he has a knack for casting aside the conventional trappings of plot in favor of an interior, psychological drama, which has made him a natural for Henry James (whose The Bostonians and The Europeans he brought to the screen). With his latest film, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, that knack may have achieved its consummation; Ivory has made a film that is about virtually nothing but a vague sense of unease. A Soldier's Daughter is based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by Kylie Jones. It is roughly the coming-of-age story of Channe Willis (Leelee Sobieski), the daughter of famous novelist and war veteran Bill Willis (Kris Kristofferson), a character modeled on Kylie's father, James Jones. As did the Joneses, the Willises--including Channe's mother, Marcella (Barbara Hershey), and her adopted brother, Billy (Jesse Bradford)--live in Paris. The parents spend much of their time drinking, playing poker and speaking execrable French, and the children attend international schools. Bill Willis has a congenitally bad heart, and the threat of his death haunts the picture like the vaguest specter. It also provides the reason for the only part of the film that passes as a major event, the family's move back to the States. Inasmuch as their story is about anything, it's about dislocation. Like characters from James, the Willises are inhabitants not of France but rather of that nebulous, unbounded expat nation of Americans abroad. "Don't say vin fuckin' rouge," Bill barks at a television showing a dubbed Stagecoach, "It's redeye, you assholes!" But neither are they tourists in the thrall of the City of Light. Ivory never steps back to show a landmark in loving light the way most directors do; this Paris is a place of apartments, streets and schoolyards like anywhere else, including America. But when the old soldier moves his family back to the States to prevent his children from becoming rootless "Euro-trash brats," they find themselves feeling friendless, without allegiances, cast adrift. Unfortunately, not only are the characters dislocated, but so is the film. Ostensibly about Channe, it begins with her adopted brother's teenage mother expecting his birth and writing in her diary in solitude by the sea. The focus then shifts to Billy, and by the time the script's attention comes to rest on Channe, we're not about to get too attached. Who's next? Every potential seed of a plot--the diary, the adoption never finalized, a car going too fast on New Year's Eve--fails to bear fruit. So resolutely does it resist being attached to any single character, place, or event, that Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala seem deliberately to have made an anti-film. One of the final shots lingers on the diary, put down on the verge of being read. The leather-bound journal has framed the film, yet it makes a promise never fulfilled. Perhaps it's just waiting for James Ivory to make a movie of it.
originally published September 23 , 1998
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