The Cider House Rules (1999)

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Those who accuse Hollywood of having some sort of liberal agenda might be hard-pressed to explain its treatment of one of today’s most polarizing political issues abortion rights. For the most part, the film industry has avoided the late 20th century’s hot button issue like the plague, just as it largely avoided the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War back in the ’60s and early ’70s, when attacks on Hollywood liberalism were equally au courant.

Aside from the occasional telefilm (Roe v. Wade, If These Walls Could Talk), abortion has mostly been either ignored by Hollywood or else used as a melodramatic plot device in teen flicks (where, unlike the real world, unwed adolescents almost always decide to “do the right thing,” and have the child). Though there’s some justification to the idea that Hollywood leans slightly left, the film business has always made business its first priority. The protests and boycotts likely to greet even a studiously neutral movie treatment of abortion have kept that issue off the table until recently, that is.

Now comes The Cider House Rules, the unapologetically sentimental labor of love from writer John Irving and director Lasse Hallstrom, based on one of the author’s lesser novels. Irving’s books have been the sources for no fewer than three previous films. The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire, and the recent Simon Birch, which was based on Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany. Despite that semi distinguished track record, Irving has been vocally bitter that Cider House which also marks his debut as a screenwriter has taken over a decade to reach the screen.

It was worth the wait, particularly given how right so many of the elements of this Cider House are. A sort of Summer of ’42 combined with elements of Oliver Twist and Irving’s usual fascination with sexual politics, Cider House tells the story of Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire), a young New Englander raised in an orphanage in rural Maine during World War II.

To his mentor, the kindly but idiosyncratic Dr. Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine) Homer is a sort of tabula rasa a blank slate of raw talent and good intentions which Dr. Larch hopes to shape into a worthy successor. It’s important to Larch that he create his own heir, because Larch is a pre Roe v. Wade abortionist, who gives the unwed mothers that materialize on the orphanage’s doorstep a choice about whether or not to terminate their pregnancies. Abortion is illegal in the America of the ’30s and ’40s, but Larch has seen the horrible things women do to themselves to avoid the stigma of pregnancy out of wedlock, and he believes it is his moral and medical obligation to offer a safe alternative.

Larch’s plans for a smooth transition go awry when it turns out that Homer has an organic revulsion toward the abortion procedure, which he views as a form of murder. Despite the almost daily suffering Homer witnesses of both the unwanted children who populate the orphanage and the women who leave them behind he is as resolutely on the side of what would today be called the “right to life” as Dr. Larch is about a woman’s “right to choose.”

Described that way, The Cider House Rules sounds a lot more like a message picture than it actually is. Irving’s talent for offbeat characterizations and Hallstrom’s gift for evoking superb performances keep the film from feeling heavy handed and issue driven by offering engrossing characters and situations where a lesser movie’s politics might be. Michael Caine caps a great career with one of his finest performances an Oscar worthy depiction of eccentric New England correctness that is simultaneously starchy and warm. Delroy Lindo, Kathy Baker and Charlize Theron all acquit themselves nicely, but even actors who’ve shown little in the way of nuance before (like Pleasantville star Maguire, who makes a fine Homer, and even Macaulay Culkin’s kid brother Kieran as Homer’s best boyhood pal) do excellent work.

It’s an open question whether or not The Cider House Rules will meet with the kind of anticipated protest which has kept it off the screen for a decade, although it would be hard to imagine a more delicate treatment of such a difficult issue. In a social environment where both sides of this particular argument feel compelled to demonize their opposition, The Cider House Rules offers a gentle but passionate plea for tolerance and understanding two attributes which, in American art as in American life, are these days in short supply.

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