A tender, a loving, a careful treatment of Calder Willingham's novelettish novel about First Love and My Most Unforgettable Character (which comes to the same thing) in the Depression-period Deep South. It has some nice qualities. The standardized narration for the coming-of-age genre ("Lookin' at that house, a painful nostalgia gripped me for the South itself") is advisedly dropped as soon as the clock is turned back to 1935; and the characters actually talk to one another occasionally, with unpressured pacing and without running short of breath. (Willingham, touted for his dialogue at least as far back as the thumbnail assessment in Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, wrote the screenplay himself.) And the core family, the Hillyers, is eccentric and unstereotyped (which does not at all come to the same thing). Into their midst comes long-stemmed Rose, a sexually adventurous domestic whom Daddy Hillyer has taken on in order to save her from some "scoundrels in Birmingham," but who only knows how to repay her benefactor by throwing her body at him. Daddy effectively blocks this pass, and the rejection leads Rose for consolation to the bedroom of the teenage son and to the movie's big scene, a curiosity-satisfying fondle beneath the bed covers. Curiosity-satisfying for him, that is; a different sort of satisfying for her. From this scene alone -- which, besides being a good example of good dialogue, might serve also as a miniature working model of the Differences Between The Sexes -- it's easy to see why Martha Coolidge, the director, would look upon this project as her own personal salvation after the string of teen movies (Valley Girl, Joy of Sex, Real Genius) and TV movies that had occupied her since her autobiographical, and auspicious, debut with Not a Pretty Picture. Honestly, though, it wears its respectability -- its literariness, its humanity, its heart -- a little vainly. Laura Dern, Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, Lukas Haas. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd