A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries

Released 1998
Stars Kris Kristofferson, Barbara Hershey, Leelee Sobieski, Jesse Bradford, Anthony Ruth Costanzo, Dominique Blanc, Virginie Ledoyen, Samuel Gruen, Luisa Conlon
Directed by James Ivory

You can sense the love of a daughter for her parents in every frame of "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries." It's brought into the foreground only in a couple of scenes, but it courses beneath the whole film, an underground river of gratitude for parents who were difficult and flawed, but prepared their kids for almost anything. The movie is told through the eyes of Channe, a girl whose father is a famous American novelist. In the 1960s, the family lives in Paris, on the Ile St. Louis in the Seine. Bill Willis (Kris Kristofferson) and his wife, Marcella (Barbara Hershey), move in expatriate circles ("We're Euro-trash"), and the kids go to a school where the students come from wildly different backgrounds. There is a younger brother, Billy, who was adopted under quasi-legal circumstances, and a nanny, Candida, who turns down a marriage proposal to stay with the family.

All of this is somewhat inspired, I gather, by fact. The movie is based on an autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, whose father, James Jones, was the author of From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line and Whistle. Many of the parallels are obvious: Jones lived in Paris, drank a lot and had heart problems. Other embellishments are no doubt fiction, but what cannot be concealed is that Kaylie was sometimes almost stunned by the way both parents treated her with respect as an individual, instead of patronizing her as a child.

"A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is not a textbook for every family. It is a story about this one. If a parent is remembered by his children only for what he did, then he spent too much time at work. What is better is to be valued for who you really were. If the parallels between this story and the growing up of Kaylie Jones are true ones, then James Jones was not just a good writer but a good man.

Summary by Roger Ebert