影片改编自小说《对不起,来不及陪你长大》,讲述了普利策获奖记者戴娜·坎纳迪(Dana Canedy)和军官查尔斯·门罗·金(Charles Monroe King)的真实爱情故事。查尔斯在海外服役期间为防止在战事中阵亡,给他们刚刚出生的儿子乔丹写下了一封家书,旨在告诉他在没有父亲的成长过程中如何过上体面的生活,同时也包含了深刻的人生感悟,以及一个父亲对他从未谋面儿子的忠告和祈祷。。The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich| his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.。