The screen biography of celebrated cellist Jacqueline Du Pré, dead of multiple sclerosis at age forty-two, has been a bit battered on musical grounds over the fact that it had to make do on the soundtrack with a cellist other than Jacqueline Du Pré, and make do on screen with no cellist at all, but merely a mummer; and battered again, and more violently, on grounds of God's truth or human decency or something, over the one-sidedness of its account, taken as it was from a memoir co-written by the cellist's rival sibling, Hilary, a less accomplished flautist who settled for a life in the countryside raising children and chickens. (The major bone of contention: Jackie's helping herself to Hilary's husband while staying under the same roof.) These causes for complaint turn out to be not too bothersome. The music, as you would expect, is whittled down to catchy snatches, anyway, most notably the scalp-tightening opening of Elgar's Cello Concerto. And in a decent attempt at "balance," the movie, or what is left of it after the first half-hour, is divided into two equal sections plainly headed "Hilary" and "Jackie," the second of which is permitted to backtrack in time and go over some of the same ground in search of the other side of the story. Some mitigating circumstances do turn up. Emily Watson, throwing herself with great abandon into the cellist's provocative physicality ("It looks so flamboyant," clucks her mum, "with all that hair flying about the place"), creates a possessed-by-demons persona that combines the traditional temperamental-artist thing with the traditional debilitating-disease thing. But just as the stoical, tongue-biting Katrin Cartlidge stole the show from Watson in Breaking the Waves, Rachel Griffiths here does roughly the same thing in roughly the same way in roughly the same role. With David Morrissey and James Frain; directed by Anand Tucker. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd