One True Thing.

As I watched the Ivory-Merchant adaptation of Kaylie Jones's novel, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, I gradually realized that it was a whitewash job. That my realization came late is a backhanded tribute to the movie. There's so much interesting stuff at its periphery that one can almost overlook the bunk at its center.

The setting is Paris in the late 1960s and early '70s with a shift to America in the last third of the story. An expatriate couple, successful novelist Bill Willis and his wife Marcella, already the parents of a girl, Channe, decide to adopt an illegitimate French boy, Benoit, who rechristens himself Billy. Since the movie's prologue shows us Billy's birth mother speculating about the future of the child she's surrendering, the audience may be misled into thinking that the fate of the boy and the character of his new parents may be the heart of the movie. But this just isn't so. Young Billy continues, unavoidably, to be prominently featured, but the story's protagonist is clearly Channe. We look through her eyes at the adult world toward which she is growing, and few of her learning experiences have anything to do with her brother.

The real theme of the movie is Channe's growing realization of the great-heartedness of her parents, especially her father. The oddest thing about the film is that, as Channe gets further into the inevitable turmoil of adolescence, her admiration for her parents keeps increasing until, by the movie's conclusion, they are virtually demigods of parental benevolence, just the opposite of what usually happens in life, where teen-agers, for a couple of years, hold their parents to be simultaneously tyrannical and irrelevant.

Let me say at once that if Kaylie Jones (whose novel I haven't read) remade her father, James Jones (the author of From Here to Eternity), into a fictionalized, even idealized, portrait, she had every right to do so. But in their adaptation, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala haven't remade him or his wife. They have simply averted their eyes. Bill and Marcella on screen aren't vividly seen paragons but mere outlines of goodness, desperately needing the star power of Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey to fill them in. Early on, Marcella has one lunatic moment of protectiveness when she throws sand into a bullying teacher's eyes. Otherwise, aside from her alcoholic intake, this character is indistinguishable from the Jane Wyatt-Donna Reed TV house-mom prototype.

Bill, who should be even more complex, is even more simply drawn. Apparently intended to be a hard-loving, hard-drinking, two-fisted profane Great American Novelist, he often has a glass in his hand and the f-word on his lips, but do we see the effects of drinking on his work? No. On his family? No. Do we see how a good novelist's obsessiveness affects his duties as a parent? No. Do we get to know how the expatriate's life affected his work or character? No. We are shown that Bill has harsh memories of World War II combat that have fructified his writing, but are we ever shown how such emotional scars might have impaired or enriched him as husband or father? Never. Bill and Marcella are shown dispensing lots of good advice (by ultraliberal bohemian criteria) to their daughter, but was there never any real conflict between the generations? There are many group hugs in this movie, but the characters of Bill and Marcella are hugged by this mistily affectionate script into sheer factitiousness.

Hershey is such a fine actress that she manages to endow Marcella with her own sexy feistiness but Kristofferson, remarkable in Lone Star, relies here less on his talent than on his now puffy face, punched-out eyes, and growly voice, which lend Bill reality for about twenty minutes, then grow tiresome.

What saves this movie (for it is undeniably gripping and entertaining)? Well, children have lives apart from their parents, and Channe spends time in the company of people who are much more vividly characterized than her parents.

The housekeeper, Candida, is an excellent sketch of just the sort of love-starved, hard-working, vinegary, possessive Frenchwoman who can become indispensable to any American couple living adventitiously in the Parisian culture. Dominique Blanque's sharp-elbowed fierceness in the role is fully equaled by her ability to express frustrated love, maternal and sexual; so it's heartbreaking when she gives up her gallant African lover's offer of marriage to stay with the family. (And what happens to Candida after her employers decamp for the States? It is characteristic of this movie's fecklessness that we never learn.)

Even better is the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo as one Francis Fortescue, a budding singing prodigy and classmate of Channe who becomes her best friend. Star magnetism comes in many packages: the roguish virility of Gable, the frenzies of Cagney and Nicholson, the hauteur of Hepburn, K., the pixyishness of Hepburn, A. Flouncing, preening, giggling, practically cooing over Channe during her first menstruation, wowing his classmates with Mozart, and singing a Puccini soprano aria on a balcony to nocturnal Paris (and, yes, that is the actor's own countertenor we are hearing), young Mr. Costanzo has star magnetism. I don't know what will become of it in a film world where models and bodybuilders become superstars by jumping out of exploding buildings, but magnetism it is.

And better still! Leelee Sobieski is an utter delight as Channe. She seems to be the spirit of a pre-Raphaelite beauty reincarnated as an American teen, and this reinforces the feeling of alienation the character projects when trying to adjust to America after a life spent in Europe. Maybe I couldn't believe in Bill Willis as a novelist but the expressiveness of Sobieski's face convinced me that Channe was a novelist aborning. A world of joy and pain certainly seems to be transpiring behind her eyes.

James Ivory's direction may not have patched the fissures in the script he helped write but, in terms of movement, tempo, and composition, he has worked efficaciously. And, not for the first time in his long career, he has elicited a bunch of great performances.

There are noble and ignoble failures. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is an ingratiating muddle. But if there had been more real pain in its portrayal of family life, there would have been more real joy, too.

Although One True Thing has the same basic situation as Soldier's Daughter - a young woman realizes who and what her parents truly are - no one could accuse it of being loosely constructed. The script (by Karen Cron out of Anna Quindlen's novel) bears down relentlessly on its three main characters and never allows any of them to surprise us. They're all just wound-up toy soldiers obeying the dictates of the script's game plan: Renee Zellweger, a hotshot reporter operating in the Big City, is forced to take a break to nurse her cancer-stricken mother (Meryl Streep). She soon learns that the academic father she's adored (William Hurt) has feet of clay and that the homemaker morn she's patronized is the "one true thing" of the title.

An acceptable premise and the leads are well acted (with Streep particularly good at conveying the humiliation felt by a person betrayed by her own body), yet the movie is preposterous. It's clear that when Zellweger is ordered by her father to abandon the fast-track to nurse mom, she'd never consent but would easily get her brother, who hates Harvard, doesn't have a job until the end of the movie, and adores his mother, to fill the post. Dad says he can't hire a nurse because Streep would never consent to a stranger in the house. In the middle of the movie, he does hire a nurse and the mother accepts her. But why bother with probability when you're making a "weepie" disguised as an adult drama?

For the sake of brevity, let me cite just one facet of the movie to demonstrate its utter phoniness. The father is supposed to be an ultra-distinguished literary critic whose collected writings are being issued by Random House in a multivolume set, each with an introduction by another distinguished critic. Yet:

* There isn't a book in sight in the household this man so indefatigably dominates, except for the volumes in his tiny office. (In Soldier's Daughter, room after room quite rightly has piles of books toppling off shelves.)

* When the nation's poet laureate shows up for Thanksgiving, the father - this veritable Lionel Trilling! this svelte version of Harold Bloom! - gushes and truckles like a groupie. (Can you imagine Harold Bloom sucking up to Robert Pinsky?)

* When the wife throws a surprise birthday party for her husband in which guests are supposed to dress up as their favorite literary characters, why does everyone (and remember that there must be at least some other academics and critics on hand) dress as a character from children's literature? Perhaps the director, Carl Franklin, who brought such flair to the action thrillers, One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress, just wasn't the right man for this particular job. And, considering the Ladies Home Journal material, perhaps that's to his credit.