Lasse Hallström’s version of John Irving’s novel is handsomely built and gently acted, and Michael Caine is the best thing in it. But it wraps every hard subject in autumn light and a warm piano until it stops being hard, and the orchard hour drifts.
Lasse Hallström, working from John Irving’s own script of his novel, has made a film about an orphanage that performs illegal abortions, a boy who leaves it, and an apple harvest. It is handsome, kind and well acted, and in 126 minutes it never raises its voice. That is the film’s manner and also its problem. Several hard things happen in it, each arrives with the light low and the piano up, and by the end we remembered the light and the piano better than the things.
The orphanage is the best of it. David Gropman builds the orphanage out of iron bedsteads, brown wallpaper and a dispensary with a rack of ether bottles, and Oliver Stapleton lights it with lamps and grey window light. Michael Caine plays Dr. Larch with a soft New England voice, a dry line for everything and a rag he puts to his face when the day is over. He is a good man doing an illegal thing because he has seen what happens when nobody does it, and Caine never asks us to admire him. Jane Alexander and Kathy Baker, as the nurses who run the place with him, make plain competence look like affection.
Tobey Maguire plays Homer as a boy who watches, which suits him. For the first forty minutes his stillness reads as a young man deciding what he thinks. Once he has left for the orchard it reads as an actor waiting for something to do. Charlize Theron is warm and direct as Candy, Paul Rudd is decent as Wally, and neither part has much in it beyond being nice to Homer. Kate Nelligan, as Wally’s mother Olive, gets one good scene about running a farm with the men gone.
The orchard hour is where the film drifts. Stapleton shoots the trees in gold and the sea in flat blue, Renee Ehrlich Kalfus puts everyone in worn wool and canvas, and Lisa Zeno Churgin cuts the picking as a slow round of ladders, crates and cider presses, so that the season passes without incident. We looked at it the way you look out of a train window. Delroy Lindo, as Mr Rose, the head of the picking crew, is the exception: courteous, quick with a knife, a man who has decided which rules apply to him, and the film wakes up whenever he speaks. Erykah Badu, as his daughter Rose Rose, does much with a handful of lines.
Rachel Portman’s score is the trouble in miniature. It is piano and strings, and it sits under nearly everything: the goodnight blessing, the picking, the first kiss, the letters home. It is a good tune. Played this often it becomes an instruction, always the same one: feel something now. Abortion, a war offscreen, a family with a secret do not need the help, and every time the piano comes in they get a little smaller.
We should say what got through. Larch’s goodnight to the boys, “goodnight, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England”, said into a dark room of iron beds, moved us more than we were prepared for. Caine plays it without a flicker of performance, as a man saying words he has said a thousand times, and that is why it lands.
The second half takes a turn involving the Rose family that we will not describe. The film handles it the way it handles everything, gently and with the strings up, and a subject that should have shaken it settles in instead. Hallström’s My Life as a Dog (1985) and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) were gentle too, and both had something sharp underneath. This one has had it sanded down.
See it for Caine, for Lindo and for the orphanage. Watch it at home on a wet evening, which is the weather it was made for, and do not be surprised if your attention wanders when the ladders come out. Most critics sit where we do; we suspect the ones who loved it were watching the light and the ones who hated it were listening to the piano.
