One of John Irving’s most abiding concerns as a novelist is the family – not the families we are born into so much as the families we create around us. Families that, through a combination of fate and choice, become our real ones.
This theme is especially strong in The Cider House Rules, which is about a 1940s orphanage, run by the ether-inhaling Dr Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine), focusing on one orphan in particular, Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire). In this setting, the usual biologically determined family unit is entirely absent, and the characters must make new families for themselves – Dr Larch with his nurses and his abandoned children, Homer when he leaves the orphanage to experience the wider world beyond.
Irving adapted his own novel (and got an Oscar for the adaptation), compressing a large, Dickensian narrative that covers 15 years – and incorporates a myriad characters – into a period of little more than a year.
It’s skilfully done, and, as directed by Lasse Halström, the movie works better in some ways than other Irving adaptations (The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire), but it does feel like the Reader’s Digest version of the novel.
Much has had to go, from Homer’s own child to the tearaway orphan Melony, who seduces Homer at an early age and later develops lesbian tendencies. Certainly, the pony-penis episode is discreetly omitted. The seduction of Homer is left to Candy (Charlize Theron), out on the apple farm. The issue of the ”cider house rules”, and what they signify for the story in general, is left vague – Irving should at least have given us a clue as to why they are important. The film is about breaking rules, for better or worse, and
developing new ones to live by.
What is harder to translate to film, once the plot has been truncated, is Irving’s unique tone: his whimsical melodrama and his taste for moments of Grand Guignol. The tone of the movie is uncertain in that regard: we get a slight whiff of whimsy, but the melodrama seems a bit nakedly manipulative. One can also be left feeling that complex issues have been dealt with in an oddly off-hand way and that difficult characters have been simplified into something approaching caricatures.
Caine, who got an Oscar for his supporting role, holds the film together as the eccentric doctor who performs illegal abortions out of a sense of moral duty, though his American accent seems a bit too inclined to cover a wide range of regional variations. Clearly, he’s no Meryl Streep. Why not just make him an immigrant from cockney London and be done with it?
Maguire is good as Homer, catching neatly his fluctuation between naivety and adult wisdom, and so is Theron in the somewhat more straightforward role of the love interest. We also get a sex scene to assure us she needs no body double. But where, in the book, there was a long, complex relationship that involved both her paralysed husband and a child, the movie has a more conventional summer romance.
Simply as a film in its own right, The Cider House Rules makes reasonably engaging viewing, as long as you can live with its strangely blithe tone and the rush of soapy melodrama. If you suspend your disbelief, as well as any urge to nitpick about its faults, you may find it – as I did – curiously touching.