My Life So Far
If pretty pictures and sweet intentions were enough to generate a  classic  family film,My Life So Farwould rivalHow Green Was My Valleyand George Cukor'sLittle  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 Fardoesn'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 forThe Cider  House Ruleswithout the darkness or the novelistic vision. The lakes, skies,  and knobby hills around Argyll, Scotland, are unexceptionably gorgeous.--Richard T. Jameson