Steven Martin's screenplay was "suggested by" the Victorian cornerstone, Silas Marner: surely not what George Eliot had quite meant to suggest, especially the Kodak Moments of the joys of parenting (the red-ribbon tether, the anti-gravity weather balloon, the two-strike home run). The role he has devised for himself is that of a disillusioned asexual miserly recluse who adopts an orphan girl and then has to fight for custody when her biological father steps forward ten years later. A story ripped not so much from today's headlines as from yesterday's soap operas. (Astounding sight for the Nineteen Nineties if not the Nineteen Teens, never mind the Nineteenth Century: an unwed mother staggering through the snow with her bundled infant clutched to her bosom.) The viewer's emotions are apt to be pitched teeteringly between indulgence and embarrassment. Such sweetness! But such rot! With Gabriel Byrne and Catherine O'Hara; directed by Gillies MacKinnon. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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