Amazon.com video review:
If pretty pictures and sweet intentions were enough to generate a
classic
family film, My Life So Far would rival How Green Was My
Valley and George Cukor's Little
Women. But those movies have strength and an acute sense of loss along
with
the sweetness and light, while--despite a death or two and the teasing
prospect of adultery--My Life So Far doesn't really engage anything
that
would disrupt its rosy childhood memoir.
First-person narrator Fraser Pettigrew (Robert Norman) is age 10 in 1920,
a
moment when it seems that the charmed life of Kiloran, the rambling
Scottish
estate he shares with several generations of his relentlessly quaint
family,
will go on forever. Even a stray shellshock casualty from the Great War--a
sub-Dickensian bogeyman who haunts the grounds--is treated as a picturesque
bit of local color. The family is what counts: would-be inventor Colin
Firth, eccentric paterfamilias and sphagnum moss farmer; his wife Mary
Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who traded an opera career for multiple maternity;
crusty uncle Malcolm McDowell, who hopes to inherit Kiloran from matriarch
Rosemary Harris and evict everybody; and Irène Jacob, the beauteous young
Frenchwoman to whom the uncle is engaged and over whom everyone else goes
gaga. Not to mention a gaggle of precocious siblings, colorful servants,
and
oddball interlopers.
This is all very slight, but amiable--sort of a Miramax dry run for The
Cider
House Rules without the darkness or the novelistic vision. The lakes,
skies,
and knobby hills around Argyll, Scotland, are unexceptionably gorgeous.
--Richard T. Jameson
