The Cider House Rules (18) Selected cinemas
The wild card in the nominations for next Sunday night's Oscars ceremony, The Cider House Rules is based on the 1985 novel by John Irving, whose work has proved problematic for writers attempting to bring it to the screen - never more so than in the recent, execrable Simon Birch, which was "suggested by" his novel, A Prayer For Owen Meany, and disowned by Irving.
One of the keys to the successful transition of The Cider House Rules from page to screen was Irving's willingness to write the screenplay. Another was the choice of the Swedish film-maker, Lasse Hallstrom, whose best work (My Life As a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?) memorably observed the trials of childhood and the turmoil of growing up.
In Hallstrom's enthralling new film Tobey Maguire plays Homer Wells, an orphan who is returned by two sets of adoptive parents to St Cloud's orphanage in rural Maine, where he is raised by the unorthodox Dr Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine). In his teens Homer is delivering babies at the orphanage - even though he never went to high school, not to mind medical school - but he draws the line at assisting Larch in carrying out the abortions which the doctor justifies by saying that otherwise the women would suffer at the hands of backstreet abortionists.
An eagerness and excitement spreads through the children at the orphanage every time a couple visits, with each child hoping that he or she will be selected. However, when a young air force pilot (Paul Rudd) and his girlfriend (Charlize Theron) come to visit, it is to seek an abortion - and when they leave, it is Homer and not one of the younger children they take with them. They get him a job at an orchard and cider brewery, where he befriends the black staff, including the foreman (Delroy Lindo) and his daughter (singer Erykah Badu in her acting debut).
Caine and Maguire are outstanding among the exemplary cast of this poignant Dickensian drama, which is shot through with an endearingly offbeat sense of humour as it follows the initially naive and idealistic Homer Wells on an eventful journey of coming-of-age and self-discovery. It is rendered deeply affecting under the direction of Lasse Hallstrom, back at the peak of his form after a few forgettable recent movies, and it is shot by Oliver Stapleton in subdued tones which reflect its mood.
Girl, Interrupted (18) General release
In her 1993 memoir which topped the US bestseller list for 11 weeks, Susanna Kaysen detailed her experiences in 1967, when she was in her teens and spent two years at McLean Hospital, a private psychiatric clinic outside Boston where former patients included the poets, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, and the singers, Ray Charles and James Taylor.
The book took its title from the Vermeer painting, Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which had resonated with the teenage Kaysen. The film of her book opens with the line, "Maybe I was really crazy, maybe it was the Sixties, or just a girl, interrupted." That line is spoken by Winona Ryder, who had spent a week in a psychiatric hospital when she was 19 and coming to terms with early fame, and a year afterwards in therapy. Ryder acquired the film rights to Kaysen's book and is its executive producer.
The film depicts Kaysen as a highly intelligent student with a bright future - until she downs a bottle of vodka and a container of aspirin, and her affluent parents refer her to a psychiatrist. Her problems are compounded by the revelation that she has been having an affair with an older, married teacher who is a family friend. She is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder "manifested by uncertainty about self-image, long-term goals, types of friends or lovers to have, and which values to adopt".
Kaysen is sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she is based in a ward for teenage girls where the inmates include a pathological liar (Clea Duvall), an anxiety-ridden patient (Elizabeth Moss) who has disfigured herself, another (Brittany Murphy) with an eating disorder, and the volatile and aggressive but charming Lisa (Angelina Jolie).
The film is at its most acute in expressing its distrust of psychiatric methods at the time and questioning the ease with which people were institutionalised then - accused of being compulsively promiscuous, Kaysen rightly retorts with a query as to how many people a young man would need to have sex with to warrant this diagnosis.
It's worth noting in this context the fascination which films dealing with disturbed, institutionalised characters exerted on Irish cinema audiences in the 1970s, shortly after this film is set, as evinced by the disproportionately high attendances here for films such as Family Life, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
Girl Interrupted is a throwback to those movies, recalling the clinical approach of Ken Loach's Family Life, in particular, in its low-key, modulated style and its simmering, combustible atmosphere. However, it is clear that Ryder chose unwisely when she asked James Mangold, who made Heavy and Cop Land, to direct Girl, Interrupted, given the heavy-handedness with which he treats the material, capturing all too vividly the boredom of daily life in the institution in his protracted movie.
The dedicated, immersed performances of a strong young cast, especially Ryder herself and the remarkable Angelina Jolie, go a long way towards sustaining interest in the film. The cast also includes Jared Leto as Kaysen's draft-dodging boyfriend, Vanessa Redgrave as the head psychiatrist, and Whoopi Goldberg as the firm but caring earth mother figure who gets the movie's worst line when she tells Kaysen, "Remember me when you shave your legs".
A Walk on the Moon (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Picking up where Girl, Interrupted ends, in 1969, A Walk on the Moon is set in a Jewish holiday resort in the upstate New York area, the Catskills, during an eventful summer when the moonwalk excited the public imagination, the Vietnam war cast a dark shadow over American life and the build-up to the Woodstock festival was under way.
Diane Lane plays Pearl, a young woman staying at the resort with her daughter, son and mother-in-law while her husband (Liev Schreiber) works weekdays as a TV repairman back home in Brooklyn. It's the summer of Love and Woodstock is just a few miles away, but it all seems a world away for Pearl, who feels the changing times have passed her by and is harbouring regrets about marrying so young.
Her dissatisfaction is paralleled with the growing sexual awareness of her 14-year-old daughter (Anna Paquin), who has fallen for one of the boys at the resort. Pearl unexpectedly finds herself drawn to one of the many travelling salesmen who visit the resort, the sexually uninhibited hippie, Walker (Viggo Mortensen) who gives her a tie-dyed T-shirt as a gift.
The familiarity of this storyline is outweighed by the honesty, humour and poignancy in Pamela Gray's semi-autobiographical screenplay and by the sympathetic treatment of all the key characters by actor Tony Goldwyn in an impressive directing debut. He establishes a keen sense of period, makes potent use of late 1960s rock music and elicits likeable, credible performances from his central cast, in which the ever-promising Paquin and the regularly underused Lane shine through.
Rear Window (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Reissued in a restored version today, Alfred Hitchcock's riveting and immensely entertaining 1954 film remains one of cinema's most telling perspectives on the capacity for voyeurism within all of us. We sit enthralled watching James Stewart (on wonderfully droll form) as an inquisitive photo-journalist who, confined to his apartment by a broken leg, staves off boredom by observing the lives of the neighbours in the courtyard where he lives - and begins to suspect one of them (played by Raymond Burr) of murdering his wife.
Astutely adapted by John Michael Hayes from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, this irresistibly involving thriller brilliantly juggles humour and tension, and Hitchcock makes dexterous use of the narrative's physical limitations. It is played with panache by a superb cast which also includes Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Wendell Corey.
The meticulous restoration is the work of Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz, who were also responsible for the painstaking restoration of Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo, which is showing in repertory at the IFC over the next week, as are two other Hitchcock classics, North By Northwest and Psycho. All four are unmissable experiences which ought to be seen on the cinema screen where they belong.
