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