Taglines: A story about how far we must travel to find the place where we belong.
The Cider House Rules movie storyline. Homer is an orphan in remote St. Cloud, Maine. Never adopted, he becomes the favorite of orphanage director Dr. Larch, who imparts his full medical knowledge on Homer, who becomes a skilled, albeit unlicensed, physician.
But Homer yearns for a self-chosen life outside the orphanage. When Wally and pregnant Candy visit the orphanage Dr. Larch provides medically safe, albeit illegal, abortions Homer leaves with them to work on Wally’s family apple farm. Wally goes off to war, leaving Homer and Candy alone together. What will Homer learn about life and love in the cider house? What of the destiny that Dr. Larch has planned for him?
The Cider House Rules is a 1999 American drama film directed by Lasse Hallström, based on John Irving’s novel of the same name. The film won two Academy Awards, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with four other nominations at the 72nd Academy Awards. Irving documented his involvement in bringing the novel to the screen in his book, My Movie Business. John Irving won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, while Michael Caine won his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Film Review for The Cider House Rules
The Cider House Rules is a very odd, glutinous sentimental drama, like an episode of The Waltons about incest, race and abortion. It is directed by Lasse Hallström, with a screenplay by John Irving, taken from his own bestseller, and has picked up a raft of Oscar nominations, including one for the excellent, much-patronised and underrated Michael Caine.
But, revisiting it now, five months after its UK premiere at the London Film Festival, it just seems odder than ever, jam-packed with incoherent moral positions, bulging with pseudo-issues, and all rendered entirely inarticulate by its own choked-up tearfulness. A good two hours consisting, almost literally, of nonsense – gurning, emoting, self-regarding gibberish.
Set during the second world war, the film tells of boyish Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire), who has been brought up in a Maine orphanage by kindly but stern Dr Larch (Michael Caine), who presides over a set-up which is also a lying-in hospital and abortion venue. Yearning to get out into the wide world, Homer gets a job on a farm picking apples and pressing them for cider. Here he falls in love with Candy (Charlize Theron) while her boyfriend Wally (Paul Rudd) is away at war.
Maguire is cute, as is Ms Theron, who, at one stage, is shown reclining languorously unclothed so as to make clear that, to paraphrase Julia Roberts in Notting Hill, she does her own ass-work. Michael Caine has presence and style, but his American accent sounds like he’s doing an impression of Loyd Grossman’s Canadian mother-in-law.
This movie combines brazenly manipulative sentimentality – picturesque sick kiddies at the orphanage – with the bizarre deployment of difficult, adult issues. For example: it tackles race. Or does it? Picking apples in Maine is clearly intended to have softer connotations than, say, picking cotton in Virginia. When Homer goes to stay at the apple-picking farm, he is the only white worker among the blacks.
Thus “making history” as the head worker Mr Rose (Delroy Lindo) coyly observes, though Homer has a special relationship with the white folks in the big house that his co-workers do not enjoy. They’re all billeted in a dormitory called the Cider House: Homer and the blacks sweetly sleep in rows of beds just like the orphanage kids. Is the infantilising effect of that deliberate? Difficult to tell.
Anyway, the workers are furious about the patronising rules posted up for their behaviour by the white boss and burn them (although the one about not using cider press machinery while drunk sounded pretty reasonable to me). But that’s as far as the racial analysis of capital and labour goes. Otherwise, the workers are utterly deferential to their employers and their employers’ friends, with Mr Rose’s daughter exchanging sisterly hugs with Candy and accepting from her charitable gifts of clothing.
The movie tackles incest. Or does it? Homer frowningly discovers a terrible case of this, but, in the end, the perpetrator’s contrite attitude allows the film smoothly to confer on him a tragic, almost noble status.
The movie tackles abortion. Or does it? Homer starts the film sternly pro-life and bitterly opposes the abortions Dr Larch carries out. In the end, some tough experiences in the real world turn his opinions around, but this conversion is glib and shallow, with nothing at stake emotionally or dramatically.
In the end, all these dark themes are disposed of in favour of a weird, feelgood atmosphere. Maybe Hallström and Irving were striving for eccentric humanist optimism. But the effect is evasive, unwholesome and deeply creepy.
The Cider House Rules (1999)
Directed by: Lasse Hallström
Starring: Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, Paul Rudd, Delroy Lindo, Michael Caine, Jane Alexander, Kathy Baker, Kieran Culkin, Heavy D, Kate Nelligan, Erykah Badu
Screenplay by: John Irving
Production Design by: David Gropman
Cinematography by: Oliver Stapleton
Film Editing by: Lisa Zeno Churgin
Costume Design by: Renee Ehrlich Kalfus
Set Decoration by: Beth A. Rubino
Art Direction by: Karen Schulz Gropman
Music by: Rachel Portman
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements, sexuality, nudity, substance abuse and some violence.
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: December 10, 1999
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