Slight, discursive, quaintly amusing period piece, based on a memoir by Denis Forman, about the incomplete education of a prepubescent Scottish lad in the Twenties, and about his difficulty in matching his learning to the life around him. He picks up plenty of fascinating information, for instance, from the forbidden books of his late grandfather stored in the attic, but he knows no better than to suggest at the dinner table that "prostitution" would be a favorable fundraising activity for his mother and his future aunt to engage in at the upcoming winter festival. The massively self-contradictory father of the family -- crackpot inventor, moss-factory entrepreneur, Beethoven lover, jazz hater, Bible thumper, and luster after his brother-in-law's French fiancée -- marks the outermost extreme of a cast of characters who are vivid and individualized without a trace of grotesquerie. And the cast of players, although a little light on Scottish accents, is attractive and able: Colin Firth, Rosemary Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Irene Jacob (the Frenchwoman, and hence excused in the matter of accents), Malcolm McDowell, Kelly Macdonald, and, as the spongelike protagonist, Robert Norman. Directed by Hugh Hudson. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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