Six-year-old Caleb loves her from the first, but Anna is wary; she doesn't want to grow attached to Sarah in case she doesn't stay. Jacob is also standoffish, still grieving for his first wife and startled by Sarah's plain-speaking ways and forceful personality. Sarah, who has lived all her life by the ocean, struggles to adjust to life in a state where there is no body of water for miles in any direction. She must decide if her future is in Maine with the people and places she has known all her life, or in Kansas with the Witting family whom she's beginning to care about.
Sarah, Plain and Tall is a good family movie about decent, ordinary people dealing not with catastrophic events, but with the trials, heartbreaks, and joys which make up real life. It is the first in a series of three films starring the same actors; the two sequels are Skylark and Winter's End, also adapted from MacLachlan's books.