Secondhand Lions
Haley Joel Osment has a face any mother could love. So why don't they? He's been neglected or abused, from "Pay It Forward" to "A.I.," by mothers sprung from a "Mommie Dearest" hatchery. The strange corollary to Osment's mama drama is the paternal healing he's been getting since "The Sixth Sense." He's Hollywood's poster child of the broken home.
In the slow and ultimately distressing "Secondhand Lions," he gets one shrew for a mother (Kyra Sedgwick) and two daddies. But before you start to congratulate (or decry) the movie's progressiveness, this is the 1950s, and they happen to be brothers as well as the kid's uncles. Robert Duvall and Michael Caine play them, Hub and Garth, and they keep this harebrained heart-tugger from complete family-flick hogwash.
Now in the voice-cracked throes of puberty, Osment plays Walter, a frail yearling of a boy, whose mother deposits him at the Texas farm of Hub and Garth. After 40 years of who-knows-what, they've resurfaced. And apparently, there's a fortune stashed somewhere on the premises, and the kid's assignment is to do his mother's gold-digging, while she goes to "court reporting school." (Sedgwick's performance is the winking personification of that old "I'm going to see a man about a horse" euphemism; she's pleased to let you know there's no horse.)
The uncles reluctantly agree to take Walter for the summer. They're lonely and wistful, thinking back to their days in the Foreign Legion, in Africa. The long-widowed Hub is especially sad, basically waiting to die, though Duvall's robust performance says otherwise. Soon their avuncular wisdom has turned into maternal warmth, and it's not long until these three are tilling soil; raising Jasmine, their mail-ordered lioness; and sharing in tales of the uncles' salad days in Marrakech. The stories fascinate Walter, who practically begs practical Uncle Garth for new installments of fearless Uncle Hub and how he stole his future bride from a sheik.
The film reenacts these episodes as cartoonish cliffhangers, with a young Hub and Garth foiling anonymous but craven Moroccans. Written and directed by Tim McCanlies, "Secondhand Lions" is made from a child's perspective, but its point of view has a glass eye. While handsome Americans come to the rescue of a beautiful Moroccan damsel, the Moroccan men are presented as swarthy caricatures of Arab danger.
That's uncomfortably retrograde. Fine, the flashbacks are set in the silent era, but must the movie's mind-set follow suit? Kids might not ask if all Arabs clean their teeth with machetes, but it's a parent's duty to inform them that given the option most would probably choose a toothbrush. The movie tries to clear things up with a conversation in the final minutes that involves Josh Lucas playing a grown-up Walter, but it's the images that linger.
And "Secondhand Lions" is full of some that are hard to justify: That final scene will be a real humdinger for anybody -- child or not -- still coming to grips with Sept. 11. Let's just say the movie's last-minute Wright brothers fantasy is wrong.
The film's stance on women is troubling, too. It coughs up not one bad, money-grubbing mom but two. The other arrives in the form of a shrill, equally distant relative (Deirdre O'Connell), who comes looking for the brothers' rumored millions. Even that lioness winds up mauling a man; yes, he's the same swindler who'd just socked Walter in the stomach, but still, why her? It's enough to make you want to cancel Mother's Day altogether.
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