A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (1998)

Well Deserved Praise

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Blistering performances.

This movie is crap. The characters are boring and unlikable, the scenes make no sense and are of little impact on following scenes, and everything that happens is really stupid. The daughter is a whore. It's supposed to have some stuff with her father really loving her but he doesn't care she's such a whore(he's okay with/encourages it) so he obviously doesn't love her. The acting is as bad as the writing. None of the characters seem to have any emotion. You want to make some kind of emotional artsy film you should get people who can act. Nothing in this film seems to have any point at all. Maybe that was the goal, to make a film so stupid and boring and pointless as to push you into nihilism.

***May Contain Spoilers***I'm still not sure if I liked this movie or not, but I definitely found its form interesting. I kept wondering throughout just where the heck this movie was going. It seemed to go off on various tangents, building mini-dramas, only to drop them at the last minute, leaving the viewer just hanging. At first it seemed to be building a story around little Billie's adoption then it backed away. Then it insinuated a drama based around Channe's encounter with the neighbor boy and then dropped it. It continued this pattern through Candida's relationship, Channe's early promiscuity, and Marcella's growing drinking problem. All leading up to Bill's death...which is treated in the same anti-dramatic style. It seems to me that the whole point of the movie was to experiment using an anti-dramatic form and style where very dramatic episodes are abandoned just before the viewer enters the realm of real feeling.

Kris Kristofferson is really good as the father, the military man, and eventually the author. The title comes from his habit of telling his daughter, Channe (Leelee Sobieski) that "a soldier's daughter never cries." The last time he says that, as she is typing at his hospital bedside, she says, "You're not a soldier anymore, you're an author."He and family had been stationed in France for a long while, and the children grew up there. He moved to the USA when they were teenagers, they had difficulty adjusting to the American school and way of life. The family handled the issue of sex in an unconventional manner. Dad figured "they're going to do it anyway, so I'd rather have them in my house, in the bedroom, instead of the back seat of a car somewhere." The boyfriend was quite surprised, to say the least.Dad died, brother came to accept the fact that his real mother did not really abandon him when she was only 15, the whole family united an memory of dad.

I was laying around one day flipping through the channels and came upon this movie and have watched it several times since. Leelee Sobieski proved to be a great actress starring with veterans Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey. Anthony Roth Constanzo gave such a stunning performance you'll wonder why this is his only film to date. I'm not sure the novel would keep my attention as the film did but if you're chilling out at home on a rainy day it's worth checking out.