My seven-year-old son John Paul and I have been spending a lot of time together recently. We chase one another around harrowing racecourses on our family’s Play Station game console. I’ve experienced a dramatic learning curve in racing with my son. He is always barking out tips and shortcuts for my benefit, showing off his agility to keep his eyes on his car as well as mine — something I will never master.
Sometimes he gets irritated with me when I don’t take a sharp enough turn around a corner and thereby lose the race. I have to constantly remind him that the joy for me is in racing, and that winning isn’t everything — especially in video games. Some of that bluster is a defense mechanism to save my pride, but the lesson still holds validity and is something that he will have to learn as he grows up. John Paul tutors my techniques and I teach him values.
Our game playing reminded me a bit of the message behind the heartwarming new movie Secondhand Lions starring Robert Duvall, Michael Caine, and Haley Joel Osment. Set in rural Texas 40 years ago, this is a coming of age story of Walter Caldwell (Osment), a shy and sheltered 14-year-old boy, who is abandoned by his self-indulgent mother and left in the hands of two crusty and eccentric great-uncles, Garth and Hub McCann (Caine and Duvall).
Walter does not want to be left in the middle of nowhere with his two strange relatives any more than these old curmudgeons want a fresh-faced kid hanging around and spoiling their perfectly unimaginative life. In the midst of the tension, however, both parties unexpectedly learn to depend on one another.
Walter ends up teaching the uncles to live happily near the exit gate of life, while Garth and Hub teach the boy to live honorably as he approaches the entrance gate of manhood.
As one would expect, there is a remarkable chemistry between Academy Award-winning actors Robert Duvall and Michael Caine (who pulls off the Texan accent with brilliance). They play cantankerous brothers that have not been seen by relatives for several decades, thus shrouded in mystery. Were they ex-Mafia hit men or members of the French Foreign Legion?
Whatever they were in the past, their lives had become as exciting as a quilting bee. Garth and Hub have to cope with traveling salesmen (who they greet with shotgun blasts), a herd of stray dogs, and irritating relatives who attempt to ingratiate themselves in hopes of landing the brothers’ rumored fortune. But their greatest enemy is feeling useless and washed up — like secondhand lions.
Although there is swashbuckling action and heartrending romance, Secondhand Lions is primarily about the tremendous need for boys to have strong male role models and the devastation of fatherlessness. Filled with guns, a lion, a pig, and a stunt plane, it is an unapologetically male movie — one that will have the men smiling, the women tearing up, and everyone laughing.
Without being preachy or maudlin, Walter is shown what it means to be a man from his wacky uncles who are rhinos on the outsides and teddy bears on the inside. He would never be the man he would eventually become without the influence and tutelage of these eccentric old men.
For every actor, the great challenge is portraying a character that is different than oneself. Haley Joel Osment (who you may remember from the Sixth Sense) plays a shy, directionless boy, devoid of strong male role models. Nothing could be further from the truth. In interviews, Osment is a winsome and articulate 15-year-old.
Citing his own father as his biggest role model, Osment told me that he played the role of Walter by doing the opposite of how he was raised. “Knowing what it was like to have a solid role model and to really grow up the correct way,” he said. “For Walter, I had to really flip it around and take it all away and know what it was like to have the loss of that. Or never know what it was like.”
Osment’s costar Michael Caine picked up on this point when he said, “We are always reading in the papers, and we know that families are falling apart and for a massive amount of people-both in this country and my country — in families the father is not present and the problems that has caused with the children.”
Caine points to Osment’s performance as a supreme example of the importance of the film. “Haley is such a wonderful actor because he has an incredible family,” he told me. “And his parents are wonderful and his father is there for him all day long-every day. And that is what you get: A rounded, great kid with a talent, as opposed to the character that he plays who is really lost and sad.”
Secondhand Lions is the humorous genius of writer/director Tim McCanlies, who also wrote the celebrated animated film The Iron Giant. Growing up in a military family with a father who was gone most of the time, McCanlies says that he turned to books and films to mentor him. In a sense, McCanlies hopes that young men seeing the film will walk away with a message in the midst of the action. And what should that message be?
“You should have your own sense of honor…even if you are in an immoral world, even if people all around you are succeeding because of cutting corners and cheating on their income taxes and screwing over their neighbors — you shouldn’t,” McCanlies replies.
Secondhand Lions is the kind of fun-filled family film that was created in the arena of brokenness to show how disjointed lives can be put into some kind of sensible order with love, virtue, and truth. “Honor and virtue are relevant to any time,” Osment says. “They are especially important today. Because we really don’t concentrate on them as much anymore.”
This is the kind of story that Hollywood should be telling. Thankfully, McCanlies did a great job on this one. I can’t wait to turn off the Play Station and watch it with my son.
— Steve Beard is the editor of Good News magazine, where this review first appeared.