Slightly less dry than the usual James Ivory film, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones (daughter of James Jones, author of From Here To Eternity and The Thin Red Line), follows an American family living in France and their eventual return home to a country suddenly unfamiliar to them. Kris Kristofferson is the firm-yet-fair father, a writer married to Barbara Hershey who raises two kids (one biological daughter, one adopted French son) in late-'60s Paris. After somewhat aimlessly flitting among different characters (the son, the maid, the mother, the school fop) and subplots, the film settles on a simple coming-of-age story revolving around Leelee Sobieski (Deep Impact) at the expense of the other potentially interesting characters. Her brother (Jesse Bradford), for instance, is a melancholy creature whose maladjusted personality is left perplexingly incomplete; Hershey is similarly neglected. What's left is the usual father/daughter domestic dynamic, with the inevitable debilitating illness looming in the distance. As tales illuminating the trail from adolescence to adulthood go, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries touches all the right bases (including the suddenly compulsory scene in which the budding woman gets her period in some public place). But with the development of most characters truncated in order to concentrate on Sobieski (who looks eerily like a young Helen Hunt), the film proves pretty dissatisfying. The increasingly weathered and cranky Kristofferson, however, is always a welcome presence.