James Ivory takes a stab at American film again

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

Despite his enormous prestige both domestically and internationally, director James Ivory remains something of an expatriate filmmaker. Though born and raised stateside, Ivory rose to prominence through a series of films depicting everyday life in contemporary India. Entering a lucrative independent production pact with the Indian producer Ismail Merchant, Ivory (and their Merchant-Ivory Productions) has become known for peerless screen adaptations of major contemporary and classic novels, including "A Room with A View," "Howard's End" and "The Remains of the Day."
These largely British productions garnered Ivory tremendous critical acclaim and made him a darling of the art-house cinema circuit, but at the same time Ivory has always had a certain affinity for America. Though not nearly as well-known, his filmography is seasoned with a spate of movies made domestically and drawn from mostly original material. For the most part, the films, "Jane Austen in Manhattan" and "Slaves of New York" have been complete misfires. The most curiously interesting of the lot, "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge," is far from Ivory's best work.
So, it is with understandable trepidation that one approaches Ivory's latest film, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," an adaptation of Kaylie Jones' memoir and an understandably attractive project for the intercontinental director. Jones, the daughter of "From Here to Eternity" author James Jones, spent much of her youth splintered between American and European loyalties, struggling to find her identity.
Jones' coming-of-age draws rich parallels to Ivory's own past, enabling the director to examine both his own love of Europe and his American heritage. "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is Ivory's most personal film to date, allowing him to mine new material and focus for the first time, since "Maurice," on younger characters.
It is a film that cannot be conveniently categorized as one of Ivory's Indian, European or American films. It is very moving, perceptive and lyrical with a delicate understanding of youth and identity. It is also, too often, a study in disorganization and unfocused storytelling.
Like any story drawn from memory, "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is decidedly picaresque in tone. However, the film, co-scripted by the director and his longtime collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, never manages to establish the strong point-of-view that would give its wandering, multi-layered narrative more direction. Though the events of the plot are related as the recollections of Jones' alter ego Channe Willis, played by newcomer Leelee Sobieski, Ivory too often excludes Channe from the action, lingering too intensively over scenes involving only other members of the Willis family.
Patriarch and famed author Bill, played by a gruff Kris Kristofferson, is working on a film adaptation of one of his novels while struggling to complete another. His wife, Marcella, played by Barbara Hershey, hosts dinner parties and frets over the complex ordeal of adopting a Parisian orphan. We even get a flashback scene involving the adopted boy's birth mother, one of the film's most tangential characters.
While Ivory hints at turning "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" into something of a meditation on love, loneliness and loss, these frequent story diversions obscure Channe as the film's central character and lessen the generally intimate nature of the storytelling. It is only in the film's final act, when the family leaves Paris and returns to the United States, that Ivory finally seems to find the heart of his story. Channe comes into her own and Ivory excels at conveying the awkwardness and confusion of her adjustment to the Western way of life.
"A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is rich in its depiction of a family and a nation both in the midst of great flux, set against the backdrop of the 1970s. But there are treasures to be found along the way as well in Ivory's densely woven fabric. A tentative romantic encounter between a young Channe and a rural neighbor boy is executed with great tenderness and grace, while Channe's later friendship with an outspoken sissy, Francis Fortescue, played by Anthony Roth Costanzo, is heartbreaking in its recount of an impossible first love.