James Ivory's adaptation of the autobiographical roman à clef of Kaylie Jones, daughter of novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity), who in the course of the story returns with his family -- wife, daughter, and adopted son -- from his self-imposed exile in France in the Sixties and Seventies, to die of heart disease in New England. The story is episodic, and (as they sometimes say) the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. Individual vignettes have an immediate impact: a bout of I'll-show-you-mine childhood sex in a treehouse, with a live snail as a sensual appetizer; a new boyfriend's startling, embarrassing, and ultimately moving demonstration of operatic prowess, in the soprano range, in front of the entire class, accompanied at the piano by his garishly unconventional mother. And even the much-covered benchmark of a girl's first period is made bearable when it comes in the midst of her music teacher's heartfelt rendition of "Let It Be." The details, of place and period, are abundant and alive: the tough-talking American writer (Kris Kristofferson) growling back at a French-dubbed Stagecoach on television -- "Don't say vin rouge, you fuckin' assholes, it's red-eye!" -- or two early teens imitating the inimitable Piaf vibrato. It all keeps trickling along in a leisurely and low-pressure European way, in luxurious bourgeois surroundings, with plenty of parties, country houses, maids, and such necessities. Because of the name-change from James Jones to "Bill Willis," and in spite of the stray TV clip of Pauline Kael and Woody Allen, there is something of a relaxation in the culture-vulturism of Ivory's preceding film, Surviving Picasso, or for that matter any number of his adaptations of more "classic" novels by James or Forster. Even so, the awareness that it was Jones, and not "Willis," may have caused the filmmaker to overestimate the greatness of the whole. Barbara Hershey, Leelee Sobieski, Jesse Bradford, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Jane Birkin. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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