Review of A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries

I was disappointed in this movie, because I thought it had great potential: Merchant/Ivory, good cast and so on. The film suffers from dealing with too broad a sweep of time. Having to cover so many incidents in the life of one family, one gets a series of incomplete gesture drawings instead of a rich oil painting focussed on one or two subjects.

I found that the characters never engaged me emotionally. The film never really let me into their world so that I really cared about them and what happened to them. So many plot threads were left undeveloped, and most of the emotionally engaging scenes of conflict were left out of the script. As an example, as Charlotte-Anne (Leelee Sobieski) develops into a young woman, she is frustrated as the family housekeeper/nanny continues to come into her room without knocking. The first time it happens, she yells at the nanny. Later in the film, she talks to her father about what is apparently a continuing problem. But we never get the logical scene where Charlotte-Anne confronts her nanny (which could have been played so many ways, and given such shading to Sobieski's character). Then, this thread with the nanny is simply left hanging.

Emotions are stated as facts, they aren't really experienced in this film.