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Making an interesting contrast with Angela's Ashes is another true between-the-wars coming-of-age tale set within a prolific Greater British family, only this one is Scottish and has money. Charmingly narrated by Fraser Pettigrew (first-time actor Robbie Norman), it recounts the riotous goings-on at a palatial 1920s estate in rural Argyll, Scotland that is "too big, which is why my mom kept having babies." Happily ensconced with his devout preacher/inventor father Edward (Colin Firth); lovely, longsuffering mother Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio); and trenchant matriarch "Gamma" (veteran actress Rosemary Harris), as well as several siblings, Fraser lives an idyllic existence. Happily exercising a lack of fear of heights, he climbs parapets, cavorts on the grounds, learns "the manly art of hunting fish," and generally enjoys childhood despite such stridently Calvinist admonitions as "don't use language like 'swimming trunks'" and "Beethoven is upright and honest, whereas jazz is sneaky and treacherous and effeminate and just plain foreign."
As if things aren't goofy enough in a place where it's not considered unusual that "Crawford saw Jesus on the lawn this morning," everybody's lives are thrown in turmoil by the arrival of Uncle Morris (Malcolm McDowell), a wealthy investor and bon vivant who thinks the massive acreage, which houses "the only moss factory in the entire continent of Europe," is going to waste, and has hinted the whole family could get evicted when Gamma dies. Inspiring even greater misgiving, and much confused, tentative passion, is Morris's youthful French fiancé, who not only prompts a burgeoning adolescence in Fraser, but uncharacteristic forwardness from Edward. His routine so enlivened and upended, led by hormones and only partial understanding of the forbidden fruits contained in very adult books he finds in his deceased grandfather's private attic library (including a fine collection of Belgian postcards), the precocious kid suddenly is prone to unannounced bouts of innocent bawdiness at unwelcome times.
But My Life So Far has more in common with those fluffy screwball comedies they used to show on The Wonderful World of Disney, albeit a PG-13 version, than Lady Chatterly's Lover, so nobody gets ravished or beheaded. There's something about the unbound Celtic/Anglo-Saxon capacity for eccentricity that makes this kind of stuff a whole lot more entertaining than if it were happening at your own dinner table. B
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