Robert Mulligan takes up his special cross-to-bear, the Sensitive Youth Movie: To Kill a Mockingbird, Up the Down Staircase, Summer of '42, et al. The youthful performances here are, as ever, expertly coached and coaxed. And Reese Witherspoon, as the fourteen-year-old heroine, looks ready to take the baton from such post-adolescent crones as Martha Plimpton, Annabeth Gish, Winona Ryder. The scene of kissing instructions from her seventeen-year-old sister ("Practice on your hand ...") makes an extremely worthwhile contribution to the genre; and the pivotal tragedy -- the death of the boy with whom both sisters are in love -- is powerfully imagined and realized. The period (late Fifties), the locale (Deep South), and the characterizations are all a little undernourished, however; and the movie most of the time feels like just the latest piece of coming-of-age data on the census taker's dutiful rounds. Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, Emily Warfield. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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