SECONDHAND LIONS

SECONDHAND LIONS
Movie (2003), 111 min
Director: Tim McCanlies

I have an old friend from high school days to thank for recommending “Secondhand Lions” to me. He sent me the text of a speech from the movie (more later) and remarked that this was “a wonderful movie, by the way.” I thought so, too. But . . .

Let’s get it out of the way right here at the top: The critics panned this movie. One of them called it “dramatically false and disturbingly dangerous” (Peter Howell, Toronto Star), and another said the film was “pretty appalling, and it’s boring” (Stephen Hunter, Washington Post).

So that’s out of the way, and I’m going to beg to differ. Yes, this story, about an adolescent boy, dropped by his irresponsible mother into the care of two eccentric great-uncles living on a Texas farm, is preposterous. Firing shotguns into the air to threaten unwanted salesmen? A fortune in the cellar? The Cockney Michael Caine playing a Texan? Yes, some of it seems preposterous.

For me, though, the movie came across as funny and sweet, with two deans of the acting world (Robert Duvall as Hub and Michael Caine as Garth) carrying off their roles with a lot of strength and maybe dignity, too. The old uncles are sitting on a lot of money. Whether the money came from their youthful shenanigans in Morocco, with the French Foreign Legion, or the money was stolen from Al Capone, we never find out.

When Walter’s mother Mae (a high-wired, chatty Kyra Sedgwick) leaves the boy (Haley Joel Osment) with them, the two men are reluctant to take him on. But they allow Walter to stay, sticking him out of the way up in a high tower of the big farm house they occupy. When Walter sees Hub out by the pond at night he thinks Hub is sleepwalking. But, as Garth eventually tells, in story form with flashbacks in the style of silent movies, Hub is actually looking for his lost love, Jasmine, a desert princess who died in childbirth many years before.

Beyond the stories, Walter sometimes finds life with the uncles entertaining and sometimes surprising. They shoot at fish and salesmen and build an airplane, take up skeet shooting, and adopt an old lion cast off by a circus. The secondhand lion fits right in with the old uncles, who are still proving their aggressive claims to manhood in their own secondhand lives.

I did say the story was preposterous, especially with its claim to a worn-out lion living in a cornfield, but I found the movie engrossing and fun. The crisp editing gave the movie a fast pace (I’m puzzled how the critic could call it “boring'), and the beautiful cinematic take on the Texas land and character was evocative of the place as it was a long time ago, and may still be somewhere back in Hill Country.

Toward the end, in a wonderful speech he likes to give young men who are about to grow up and face “reality,” Hub tells Walter that “sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power, mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil.”

For some reason, “Secondhand Lions” put me in mind of a many-times-great uncle of mine, who died at the Alamo. His name was William Barret Travis. Some people said he was crazy, but nobody ever said he lacked courage. Travis probably held to a code very much like Hub’s.

So what if this movie might or might not make real sense? I believed and enjoyed seeing it all.