A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries One True Thing
Alleva, Richard
s I watched the Ivory-Merchant adaptation of Kaylie Jones's novel, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, I gradually realized that it was a whitewash job. That my realization came late is a...
...Bill and Marcella are shown dispensing lots of good advice (by ultraliberal bohemian criteria) to their daughter, but was there never any real conflict between the generations...
...There's so much interesting stuff at its periphery that one can almost overlook the bunk at its center...
...They're all just wound-up toy soldiers obeying the dictates of the script's game plan: Renee ZeUweger, a hotshot reporter operating in the Big City, is forced to take a break to nurse her cancer-stricken mother (Meryl Streep...
...We are shown that Bill has harsh memories of World War II combat that have fructified his writing, but are we ever shown how such emotional scars might have impaired or enriched him as husband or father...
...Leelee Sobieski is an utter delight as Channe...
...Star magnetism comes in many packages: the roguish virility of Gable, the frenzies of Cagney and Nicholson, the hauteur of Hepburn, K., the pixyishness of Hepburn, A. Flouncing, preening, giggling, practically cooing over Channe during her first menstruation, wowing his classmates with Mozart, and singing a Puccini soprano aria on a balcony to nocturnal Paris (and, yes, that is the actor's own countertenor we are hearing), young Mr...
...The real theme of the movie is Channe's growing realization of the great-heartedness of her parents, especially her father...
...Since the movie's prologue shows us Billy's birth mother speculating about the future of the child she's surrendering, the audience may be misled into thinking that the fate of the boy and the character of his new parents may be the heart of the movie...
...An acceptable premise and the leads are well acted (with Streep particularly good at conveying the humiliation felt by a person betrayed by her own body), yet the movie is preposterous...
...But this just isn't so...
...We look through her eyes at the adult world toward which she is growing, and few of her learning experiences have anything to do with her brother...
...Yet : _9 There isn't a book in sight in the household this man so indefatigably dominates, except for the volumes in his tiny office...
...Can you imagine Harold Bloom sucking up to Robert Pinsky...
...9 When the wife throws a surprise birthday party for her husband in which guests are supposed to dress up as their favorite literary characters, why does everyone (and remember that there must be at least some other academics and critics on hand) dress as a character from children's literature...
...Bill and Marcella on screen aren't vividly seen paragons but mere outlines of goodness, desperately needing the star power of Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey to fill them in...
...In Soldier's Daughter, room after room quite rightly has piles of books toppling off shelves...
...For the sake of brevity, let me cite just one facet of the movie to demonstrate its utter phoniness...
...9 When the nation's poet laureate shows up for Thanksgiving, the father-this veritable Lionel Trilling...
...But in their adaptation, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala haven't remade him or his wife...
...It is characteristic of this movie's fecklessness that we never learn...
...I don't know what will become of it in a film world where models and bodybuilders become superstars by jumping out of exploding buildings, but magnetism it is...
...And better still...
...Maybe I couldn't believe in Bill Willis as a novelist but the expressiveness of Sobieski's face convinced me that Channe was a novelist aborning...
...They have simply averted their eyes...
...Do we get to know how the expatriate's life affected his work or character...
...She soon learns that the academic father she's adored (William Hurt) has feet of clay and that the homemaker mom she's patronized is the "one true thing" of the title...
...The oddest thing about the film is that, as Channe gets further into the inevitable turmoil of adolescence, her admiration for her parents keeps increasing until, by the movie's conclusion, they are virtually demigods of parental benevolence, just the opposite of what usually happens in life, where teenagers, for a couple of years, hold their parents to be simultaneously tyrannical and irrelevant...
...Even better is the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo as one Francis Fortescue, a budding singing prodigy and classmate of Channe who becomes her best friend...
...Let me say at once that if Kaylie Jones (whose novel I haven't read) remade her father, James Jones (the author of From Here to Eternity), into a fictionalized, even idealized, portrait, she had every right to do so...
...In the middle of the movie, he does hire a nurse and the mother accepts her...
...There are noble and ignoble failures...
...Bill, who should be even more complex, is even more simply drawn...
...Young Billy continues, unavoidably, to be prominently featured, but the story's protagonist is clearly Channe...
...Do we see how a good novelist's obsessiveness affects his duties as a parent...
...And, considering the Ladies Home Journal material, perhaps that's to his credit...
...But if there had been more real pain in its portrayal of family life, there would have been more real joy, too...
...Dad says he can't hire a nurse because Streep would never consent to a stranger in the house...
...Early on, Marcella has one lunatic moment of protectiveness when she throws sand into a bullying teacher's eyes...
...lthough One True Thing has the same basic situation as Soldier's Daughter--a young woman realizes who and what her parents truly are---no one could accuse it of being loosely constructed...
...so it's heartbreaking when she gives up her gallant African lover's offer of marriage to stay with the family...
...On his family...
...this svelte version of Harold Bloom!--gushes and truckles like a groupie...
...There are many group hugs in this movie, but the characters of Bill and Marcella are hugged by this mistily affectionate script into sheer factitiousness...
...A world of joy and pain certainly seems to be transpiring behind her eyes...
...And, not for the first time in his long career, he has elicited a bunch of great performances...
...But why bother with probability when you're making a "weepie" disguised as an adult drama...
...She seems to be the spirit of a pre-Raphaelite beauty reincarnated as an American teen, and this reinforces the feeling of alienation the character projects when trying to adjust to America after a life spent in Europe...
...The script (by Karen Cron out of Anna Quindlen's novel) bears down relentlessly on its three main characters and never allows any of them to surprise us...
...A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is an ingratiating muddle...
...Apparently intended to be a hard-loving, hard-drinking, two-fisted profane Great American Novelist, he often has a glass in his hand and the f-word on his lips, but do we see the effects of drinking on his work...
...Costanzo has star magnetism...
...The father is supposed to be an ultra-distinguished literary critic whose collected writings are being issued by Random House in a multivolume set, each with an introduction by another distinguished critic...
...Otherwise, aside from her alcoholic intake, this character is indistinguishable from the Jane Wyatt-Donna Reed TV housemorn prototype...
...That my realization came late is a backhanded tribute to the movie...
...Perhaps the director, Carl Franklin, who brought such flair to the action thrillers, One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress, just wasn't the right man for this particular job...
...Well, children have lives apart from their parents, and Channe spends time in the company of people who are much more vividly characterized than her parents...
...Hershey is such a fine actress that she manages to endow Marcella with her own sexy feistiness but Kristofferson, remarkable in Lone Star, relies here less on his talent than on his now puffy face, punched-out eyes, and growly voice, which lend Bill reality for about twenty minutes, then grow tiresome...
...It's clear that when Zellweger is ordered by her father to abandon the fasttrack to nurse mom, she'd never consent but would easily get her brother, who hates Harvard, doesn't have a job until the end of the movie, and adores his mother, to fill the post...
...Dominique Blanque's sharp-elbowed fierceness in the role is fully Commonweal | 8 October 23, 1998 equaled by her ability to express frustrated love, maternal and sexual...
...What saves this movie (for it is undeniably gripping and entertaining...
...The setting is Paris in the late 1960s and early '70s with a shift to America in the last third of the story...
...James Ivory's direction may not have patched the fissures in the script he helped write but, in terms of movement, tempo, and composition, he has worked efficaciously...
...And what happens to Candida after her employers decamp for the States...
...The housekeeper, Candida, is an excellent sketch of just the sort of lovestarved, hard-working, vinegary, possessive Frenchwoman who can become indispensable to any American couple living adventitiously in the Parisian culture...
...An expatriate couple, successful novelist Bill Willis and his wife Marcella, already the parents of a girl, Channe, decide to adopt an illegitimate French boy, Ben6it, who rechristens himself Billy...
...Commonweal | 9 October 23, 1998...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 18
