The Cider House Rules

By John Pavlus

Where did Curtis Hanson come from?

The media-manufactured gilded age of American independent cinema was born, by most pop historians' accounts, out of the box-office crater left by sex, lies, and videotape. But in the 10 years since, the infant market christened by Soderbergh's hit has grown up into an obese sluggard--and upstart distributor Miramax, once the twinkle in its precocious eyes, is now the largest contributor to its complacently swollen gut. With the Academy-masturbating The Cider House Rules as its latest fascistically-campaigned Oscar contender, that ever-metastasizing studio clone takes yet another step in its apparent quest to reduce the phrase "independent film" to an empty, eye-rolling ironism.

Depressingly hollow and transparently propagandistic, The Cider House Rules is a prestige-picture wannabe whose fool's-gold patina flakes away with regrettable ease. Wooden It-Boy Tobey Maguire stars as the allegorically-named orphan Homer Wells, growing up in 40s Maine under the tutelage of orphanage headmaster Dr. Larch (Michael Caine). Perennially unchosen by visiting adopters, Homer becomes a son of sorts to the pragmatic Larch, who good-naturedly railroads the young man into a medical apprenticeship with him. A phalanx of limp genre mainstays (winsome kiddies with cutesy nicknames, a coven of matronly nurses, cloying Hallmark-card dialogue) deploys to ready us for the inevitable appearance of The Message, which reads as follows: "Dr. Larch performs abortions; Dr. Larch is good. Homer won't perform abortions; Homer is stupid." This pronouncement, expressed with similar grace and subtlety in the film, is the blunt peg on which the entire affair hangs. As a thoughtful exploration of situational ethics, it's right up there with Reefer Madness.

Poor stupid Homer has to be educated, of course, and via two baldly manipulative encounters, the filmmakers handily ensure his eventual return to their myopic party line. First there's the raped runaway he finds in the woods, whose botched, self-administered abortion puts her into an early grave. (Her burial ceremony, solemnly administered by Larch, seems less a dignified farewell than a calculated guilt trip leveled at his young protŽgŽ.) And later we meet the economically-disadvantaged incest victim, for whom abortion stands as the sole deliverance from a life of debilitating emotional trauma. Given such thorny moral quandaries, Homer's climactic conversion takes all of five seconds.

John Irving, who adapted the script from his own novel, probably insists that this ethico-political turkey shoot is not just "an abortion movie." Okay, he's right: it's an abortion movie with Charlize Theron naked. Apparently lacking the conviction to buttress his own ultraliberal fantasies, Irving assumes he's preaching to the converted and spends the bulk of the film wantonly digressing into romantic melodrama. On a completely unmotivated whim (or maybe it just seems that way, thanks to Maguire's non-acting), Homer ditches Larch to work on Theron's apple farm with a team of black migrants. In the interim before the obligatory Maguire-Theron bangfest, Irving kills time with some didactic racial foregrounding (Poor blacks were second-class citizens in the 40s? You don't say!) and half-assed moral waffling (Charlize's husband is away at war, so she's kinda cheating--but hey, people got needs!). As always, a spoonful of sex helps the p.c. pabulum go down--and in the most delightful way, if the Academy's fawning endorsement (seven nominations?!) is any indication.

The deathblow to the "Tradition of Quality" supposedly came 50 years ago in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema, but films like The Cider House Rules prove that the same cowardly, over-literary "tendencies of cinema" Truffaut made his name railing against are still alive (and just as dubiously lauded) today. Examinations of loaded social issues like abortion, though they often are in our bipolar media environment, need not be visualized with ideological blinders on. (For a genuinely insightful, truly pro-choice portrait of abortion's checkered history, check out If These Walls Could Talk.) As for The Cider House Rules, its gutless soapboxing reeks of the same self-righteous stench emanating from the Religious Right. But maybe we should just cut our losses: at least Jerry Falwell isn't making movies, too.

John Pavlus is a senior film major at Ithaca College.