A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries

Nor need she, for if she's the daughter of brilliant novelist James Jones, hers is a privileged life. Yet the sole reason Kaylie Jones's tepid novel-memoir was committed to film -- her relationship to the famed author -- has been effaced by the film's insistence on pseudonyms. Not that Kris Kristofferson's Jones manqué character has much to do with anything -- he broods avuncularly on the fringes, his genius and demons irrelevant, with Barbara Hershey a more engaging presence as his wife. None of Jones's dark, edgy talent seems to have found its way into this account from Kaylie (played by a passive Leelee Sobieski), an episodic, humdrum tale of growing up in Paris in the '60s, relating to her adoptive brother, and dealing with high-school dating on her family's return to America. Daughter is directed by James Ivory, whose pointless period window dressing and dramatic inertia underscore the insipidity of this confessional indulgence. At the Avon and Jane Pickens.

-- Peter Keough