The Cider House Rules

THE CIDER HOUSE RULES

Rating: B-
Director Lasse Hallstrom infuses The Cider House Rules with many poignant and memorable scenes. Often the deep emotions stir just beneath the surface, while the characters try to carry on as if unhurt by the deep wounds they're feeling. Prospective viewers should be warned, however, that Cider House has a political axe to grind. The film is staunchly pro-abortion, and the events of the (fictional) narrative are orchestrated to support that point of view.

Michael Caine is a medical doctor in charge of St. Cloud's, an orphanage in Maine in the early 1940's. Beneath the cheerful atmosphere he and the nurses strive to maintain, lies the desperation of every child who realizes his or her chances of being adopted progressively fade with every year they age. Some who are ill have no chance of ever leaving the orphanage; they are destined to remain unwanted their entire lives. Caine insightfully portrays a doctor who realizes he must sustain the children's sense of self-worth at all costs, while inwardly acknowledging the dismal futures most of them face. This entails several heart-wrenching scenes along the way.

When one of Caine's charges (Tobey Maguire) grows into a young man, he comes to assist Caine in the day-to-day operations of the orphanage, including the medical treatment of its inhabitants and the occasional abortion. He is, in effect, one of the orphanage's success stories. But when Charlize Theron and beau Paul Rudd drive up one day seeking an abortion, Maguire gets a glimpse of the outside world and feels a longing to explore it.

Many elements of the plot become predictable after this, particularly in relation to Theron and Rudd, but there is always enough else happening to keep things interesting. Certainly, there are similarities to David Copperfield, something writer John Irving acknowledges within the film. When Maguire goes to work as an apple picker, he finds he has left the world of the orphanage for the world of the equally destitute migrant farmworkers.

Okay, now for the rant. When I decided to see this film, I knew little about it. The fact that it starred Michael Caine and was not about asteroids falling from the sky seemed to bode well. So I was a little dismayed by the political preaching which forms the backbone of the narrative. Which side of the abortion issue you happen to be on is irrelevant here (we'll save that for a Blather column some day); my objection is to events in a completely fictional film being manipulated to further a political agenda, no matter what that agenda is. That the film is set during World War II (when abortion was illegal) allows Caine's character to rail against society for imposing laws upon people it otherwise couldn't care less about. This sentiment then gets repeated later with the actual "cider house rules." Throughout the movie, it seems writer Irving's solution for any problem is to kill the people at the root of it, whether those people be the perpetrator of some heinous crime or unwanted babies in the womb. Of course, World War II was also the time of significant events occurring on the other side of the ocean. Hitler had decided the solution to dealing with people he had no use for was to kill them by the millions. Do you think Irving and Hallstrom are intelligent enough to realize the parallels drawn by setting their pro-abortion film in the same time period as the Holocaust? Maybe this film is really a satirical anti-abortion film after all? Nah.