The Cider House Rules

* * * *

Cast: Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron

Director: Lasse Hallstrom

Rating: M (violence offensive language)

Running Time: 130 minutes

Opens: Now showing, Village Broadway, Queen St

Review: Russell Baillie


The stories of John Irving have had a sad life on the big screen. The World According to Garp and Hotel New Hampshire were likable muddles. The recent, truncated version of Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, which become the kid-weepie Simon Birch, was a disaster.

Which is maybe why Irving himself is finally on screenplay adaptation duties for his 1985 bestseller. The result, via the trademark lyrical delivery of Swedish director Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?), is a touching bitter-sweet charmer. An understated film which has, perhaps surprisingly, garnered seven Oscar nominations.

In 1930s New England, young Homer Wells (Maguire) proves the boomerang baby at St Cloud's orphanage. So establishment head Dr Wilbur Larch (Caine) takes him under his kindly paternal wing and trains him. By his teens Homer is an able, if unqualified, obstetrician and a caring big brother to the orphanage's charges.

But one day Homer decides to start his odyssey in the outside world, having fallen out with Larch over the abortions he performs illegally but out of what he sees as an ethical duty.

Homer ends up working in an apple orchard, living with a crew of migrant pickers in the cider house of the title, his medical skills put aside.

Soon he's in love for the first time with Candy (Theron), a woman he met at St Cloud's when she came for a termination, her pilot boyfriend having left for the Second World War soon after. But all the while Larch tries to lure his young charge back to help him carry on his good works, untroubled by his governing board.

The veteran Caine, sporting a convincing American accent, is the best he's been in years as Larch. To describe the effortlessly natural Maguire as the "next Tom Hanks" is not based on any resemblance his character has to Forrest Gump.

The Cider House Rules might be another coming-of-age yarn from a supposedly innocent era but it manages to be as unorthodox as it is old-fashioned. It's imbued with a particularly American whimsy, but has a curious aftertaste - maybe it's the tang of the ether that Larch spends his leisure hours huffing to block out the sadness that surrounds him.

It's typically, yes, Irvingesque with due reference to Dickens' David Copperfield. It's also a tale well told - a movie of the story rather than a film of the book is how Irving has put it - of how life's little ironies can turn into a larger cruelties.