December 16–23, 1999

movie shorts

The Cider House Rules

John Irving has long been a vocal critic of the movie adaptations of his books, so when it came time to turn 1985’s The Cider House Rules into a movie, Irving held out for 14 years (as chronicled in his new My Movie Business) to make sure he could write the script himself. Like previous films based on Irving novels (The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire and a third, Simon Birch, "suggested by" A Prayer for Owen Meany and disowned by the author), this one features an array of quirky characters and situations, an odd nostalgia that passes for history and emotional complications that eventually devolve into sentimentality. Irving’s stories tend to be expansive and raucous, full of wild life and yearning, and populated by characters who can’t quite get hold of themselves.

Set in the 1930s and ’40s, The Cider House Rules is scattershot in a typically Irving-ian way: The years drift by, characters multiply and themes bear only vague relation to each other. It could be that the film is concerned with the chronically troubled relations between parents (or their substitutes) and children, or racism, or with the traumas caused by class inequities in the ostensibly class-mobile United States. Or it could be that the film is about the cheeseball power of love, whether between boys and girls or between family members — that is, the love that binds and (in fiction, anyway) empowers people at the same time. Or maybe it’s about the ways that people learn to repress their most fervent desires in order to take care of those who need them, and how such sacrifice leads to resentment and rage, or just numbness.

Numbness is where you end up at the end of Cider House, which can accommodate most any of the above thematic possibilities. The lack of focus is surprising, since director Lasse Hallström’s earlier movies (My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?) demonstrate that he has his own subtle sensibility and psychosocial preoccupations. Given his rep for quirkiness, you might imagine that he’d be an ideal guide through Irving’s turbulent waters. But there’s always the dreaded problem that Irving identified in Garp as "the undertoad," the mysterious, indelicate force that will suck you down and destroy you.

Cider House opens in an orphanage in the teeny rural town of St. Cloud’s, ME, where Dr. Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine) oversees his young charges with admirable compassion and devotion, while also performing abortions for young women and girls in need. The good Dr. Larch struggles with three essential dilemmas. First, abortion is not only illegal but severely condemned by the general population; second, he’s developed a nasty and debilitating ether addiction; and third, he never quite gets the hang of this Maine accent, occasionally lapsing into something that sounds almost, and strangely, Cockney.

Dr. Larch’s best assistant at the orphanage is an orphan himself, the significantly named Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire). Though Homer learns all the medical procedures that Wilbur knows and delivers babies like a pro, he refuses to perform abortions. The orphans — who include the adorable Buster (Kieran Culkin), the always-wheezing (read: doomed) Fuzzy (Erik Sullivan) and Mary Agnes (Paz de la Huerta) — and the resident nurses, Edna (Jane Alexander) and Angela (Kathy Baker), form, with Homer and Wilbur, a solid family group, pained each time one of their members leaves, or, as they recite in ritual on these nights, has "found a family."

After way too much background time in the orphanage, the film finally lurches into the 1940s, where Homer falls in love with Candy (Charlize Theron, looking glamorous in period sweaters and skirts), a lobsterman’s daughter who, with her flyboy boyfriend Wally Worthington (Paul Rudd, as superficially sweet as he’s ever been), has come to St. Cloud’s to have an abortion. After befriending Wally and Candy, Homer leaves the orphanage to work in the Worthington family orchard, run by mama Olive (Kate Nelligan). Hurt and angry that Homer wants to leave, Dr. Larch refuses to say goodbye, but the nurses and the kids hope out loud that Homer "has found a family."

Homer’s surrogate family, though, is even more dysfunctional than most. The relations between the three friends become complicated when, while Wally’s away at war, Candy and Homer start an affair. But when Candy learns that Wally’s been wounded and is coming home, she has to decide how she wants to spend the rest of her life. Homer, being the accommodating fellow and best friend that he is, awaits her decision, all the while building a reserve of resentment at the girl’s apparent carelessness concerning his feelings.

Meanwhile, in a subplot painfully related to his own love crisis, Homer becomes involved with a migrant apple-picking crew headed by Mr. Rose (Delroy Lindo, mesmerizing as always). It’s in this situation — as a laborer, a member of another makeshift family — that Homer comes to understand just how dysfunctional families can be. In addition to Peaches (Heavy D) and Muddy (K. Todd Freeman), Mr. Rose’s crew includes his daughter, the also significantly named Rose Rose (Erykah Badu, in an absolutely lovely performance). Rose soon reveals to Homer that she’s pregnant and, for harrowing reasons, unhappy about it, which forces him into a decision as to how to use his abilities as an unlicensed obstetrician and as-yet-untested abortionist.

So here’s the irony: After all his chasing rainbows with the beautiful (and let’s admit it, ominously named) Candy, Homer’s lessons come courtesy of this angry, self-sufficient and resourceful crew of migrant workers and, especially, a young woman with whom he believes he has little in common. (Rose appears to have a loving father and secure sense of herself.) And here’s the other irony: What seems to be Homer’s ascent to paternity is followed by just a return to adolescence, as he rejects the outside world for the safety of the orphanage, a retreat rather than a resolution.

—Cindy Fuchs