Catching up on my NetFlix Rentals

Thank heavens it's finally cool enough to actually go into my living room and watch a movie. I've had the same 3 CD's waiting to be watched for over a month now.

Been wanting to see The Cider House Rules for some time now. And not only because Tobey Maguire is my second favorite geek-boy of all time (no points for guessing my favorite). But I'd heard great things about the movie, and Michael Caine had won an Oscar for his performance, and I *still* hadn't seen Charlize Theron in anything... so it seemed like it was time.

I've been having a rough week, and when I started this movie, I found that it's slow pace and lack of focus didn't hold my attention at first try. However, going back to it another night, I found I loved it. It does indeed have a slow, sort of pastoral and slightly epic, feel to it. It doesn't jump right out and grab you, but rather pulls you slowly into its spell. It has a sort of dreamlike quality, with many issues touched on but not resolved, and some characters whose fates aren't fully explored. In a feature concerning the making of the movie, the book and screenplay's author, John Irving, says that he is glad that he did the screenplay himself so that he could choose what to pare down or leave out. Seeing what he has chosen for the screen definitely wants to make me read the book to see if more is explained there, or if he has left as much ambiguity in the printed form as he did in the film. (Ambiguity is certainly not unknown in Irving's work.)

The performances are uniformly first rate. I was particularly impressed with Kieran Culkin as Buster, one of the orphans who is closest to Tobey's Homer, and Erik Per Sullivan as Fuzzy, one of the most fragile boys. Caine and Maguire are, as expected, first rate, although I would *really* like to see Tobey play an entirely different character at some point since Homer is very much within his comfort zone. The supporting cast is everything you could hope for, and each character seems to have a fully-developed life outside the scope of the movie.

This is by no means a movie without flaws. It's pace has been described by some as somnolent, and I understand that much of the background given in the book about Homer has been excised. It raises a lot of questions that it doesn't answer. But I found it totally worthy of the time I spent watching it. Rent the DVD, if you can, and also take a look at the documentary (and listen to the always-interesting John Irving and director Lasse Hallstrom) and the deleted scenes.