Other Titles • My Life So Far • World of Moss (1998)
Synopses for My Life So Far (1999)
1.
If pretty pictures and sweet intentions were enough to generate a classic family film, My Life So Far would rival How Green Was My Valley and George Cukor's Little 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 Far doesn'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 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
2.
Director Hugh Hudson's charming coming-of-age tale, set in the early 1900s, stars Robert Norman as Frasier Pettigrew, a young rebel growing up at his idyllic family estate in the countryside of Scotland, surrounded by his eccentric family. His father, Edward (Colin Firth) is a genius inventor, constantly concocting wild business schemes while running about the estate testing new gadgets. His sweet-natured mother, Moira (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), runs the household and looks after her large brood of children with the help of the family matriarch (Rosemary Harris). The family estate is a haven for the large Pettigrew family, where they live in relative seclusion from the outside world until one fateful summer. When Frasier's Uncle Morris (Malcolm McDowell) arrives with Heloise (Irene Jacob), his beautiful French fiancée, the Pettigrews experience a summer like no other. Heloise is a youthful charmer, brash and outspoken, with a passion for jazz and her French cello. She instantly charms the entire family, especially young Frasier, who has never met anyone like her. But when Edward begins to have feelings for his brother's fiancée the entire Pettigrew family and their idyllic Shangri-La is threatened. Based on the novel SON OF ADAM by Sir Denis Forman, MY LIFE SO FAR features Norman as a memorable and charming young narrator, full of whimsy and youthful curiosity.
3.
After this summer, their lives will never be the same!
Colin Firth (Shakespeare In Love), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (Limbo) and Malcolm McDowell (Mr. Magoo) star in this delightfully charming comedy about the fun and awkwardness of growing up! Young Fraser Pettigrew has always been an adventurous child. But with the arrival of his sexy French aunt Heloise (Irene Jacob - U.S. Marshals), Fraser enters a truly eye-opening summer of discovery as he learns some delicious truths about childhood and the comic eccentricities of his loving family! Also featuring Rosemary Harris (Hamlet), the great ensemble cast lights up the screen. Come join the Pettigrews as their lives are forever changed in one unforgettable season!
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