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 Irene 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

Description
Colin Firth (BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY), 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 adulthood 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!