Sept. 18, 1998
By JOE MORGENSTERN
If smooth carpentry were the only criterion for an enjoyable movie, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" would come up woefully short. Sometimes this adaptation of Kaylie Jones's autobiographical novel seems as roughhewn as Kris Kristofferson's portrayal of Bill Willis, who's a surrogate for Ms. Jones's father, the late novelist James Jones. (If cragginess were the only qualification for enshrinement on Mount Rushmore, Mr. Kristofferson would already have been taken for granite.) The episodic narrative sprawls across a decade, from the 1960s, when Willis and his family are expatriates in Paris, to their troubled repatriation in the 1970s. Scenes misfire at least as often as they catch fire. Characters appear, drop from sight, then pop up again in odd flashbacks. Yet the film, like its exotic milieu, is full of surprises, full of love and life.
The greatest surprise, and the most exotic apparition, isn't part of the Willis family at all. He's Francis Fortescue (Anthony Roth Costanzo), a self-dramatizing English schoolmate of Channe Willis, the daughter of the title, through whose eyes Kaylie Jones's coming-of-age story is told. (Channe is played, delicately and simply, by the fine young American actress Leelee Sobieski.) Bill Willis claims that Francis sounds like "a dying animal" when he laughs, but the boy sounds like a lonesome angel when he sings arias from Mozart or Verdi in his soaring countertenor, with vibrato borrowed from Edith Piaf. For Channe, coming of age requires distancing herself from this sexually singular friend. It also means coming to terms with her beloved, flinty father; her competitive mother, Marcella (Barbara Hershey); and her adopted brother, Billy (Jesse Bradford), whose assimilation into the eccentric family occupies its own misshapen subplot.
Eccentricity is the hallmark of this film, which was produced by Ismail Merchant, directed by James Ivory and adapted by Mr. Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the same team behind so many meticulously crafted Merchant-Ivory films of the past. Maybe they've lost patience with careful craftsmanship. Clearly Mr. Ivory was enchanted with Francis, and followed his good instincts in giving the boy dramatic prominence. It's less clear that Mr. Kristofferson has constructed a performance in any conventional sense of the term, though he plays Bill's death scene several times in advance. Instead, he creates an indelible presence from stiff postures, gruff delivery and slow, stolid, strangely moving plainspokenness. Is this a demonstration of the actor's craft, or the absence of it? I don't know, but I'd rather not argue with indelibility.