Is it gently celebrating eccentricity or mildly deploring familial dysfunction?  This story, told by a 10-year-old boy growing up in a Scottish castle in the 1920s, can't quite make up its mind on that matter.  Or what it thinks of its central figure, Edward (Colin Firth), an
impractical inventor trying to make a go of moss farming.  He is at once lustful (his
determined eye is cast at his brother-in-law's pretty French fiancée), a good father to his numerous brood, yet sometimes abrupt and heedless of them.  He's a stormy character, all right, but an unfocused one, and this well-cast adaptation of a memoir by a British TV executive is disjointed, only queasily humorous and too casual about its dark undercurrents.
--By Richard Schickel

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