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Best of DVDs...with M.V. Moorhead

Secondhand Lions

Solid family films don't come along every day, but out this month on DVD is this engagingly cornball tale that you just might enjoy as much as your kids will, especially if you appreciate examples of top-notch acting.

Somewhere in the 1950s or early ‘60s, Walter (Haley Joel Osment), the adolescent hero of Secondhand Lions, is ditched for the summer by his neglectful young mother (Kyra Sedgwick) with two crusty, eccentric great-uncles (Michael Caine and Robert Duvall).

These two live in a rattletrap house in rural Texas, not spending the fortune  they’re rumored to have stashed somewhere. Their chief source of entertainment is firing shotguns over the heads of the salesmen who can’t resist approaching them.

As the story progresses,  the anxious, bookish boy is taught a healthy wildness by the old reprobates, and he in turn teaches them to be a couple of good surrogate parents.

Under Walter’s influence—and that of one particularly persistent salesman (Adrian Pasdar)—the codgers realize their fortunes do them no good if they never spend them, so they start making wacky purchases, like a skeet-shooting machine, a biplane and even a live, elderly lioness, which becomes Walter’s pet. The boy and his uncles plant corn together, torment greedy relatives and mix it up with local teenagers.

The friendlier of the uncles, Garth (Caine), tells Walter tales of their youth, which we also see in campy flashback.

Garth claims they were once in the French Foreign Legion, and he casts his more taciturn brother, Hub (Duvall), as a swashbuckling hero who romances a beautiful North African Princess (Emmanuelle Vaugier) and clashes with a sinister Sheik (Adam Ozturk). Just as the enraptured Walter is nearing the end of this tale, his mother shows up with her latest creep boyfriend (Nicky Katt) in tow.

In other words, Secondhand Lions is a fairly shameless collection of secondhand ideas. But at its center are two of the best actors of their generation, and they rescue this jocular coming-of-age yarn from its case of the cutes.

Caine, though he has more lines and business, hangs back, and like his character throws the focus to Duvall, who’s so commanding that he actually makes you listen to the cornpone wisdom Hub dispenses.

Both of these men are vigorous old lions, and still in first-rate acting condition.

As for Osment, he’s almost too old for his role, but the same emotional maturity that made him so impressive in The Sixth Sense is present here, in a lighter key, and he holds his own just fine opposite the old masters.

The writer-director is Tim McCanlies, who wrote the excellent screen adaptation of The Iron Giant. He isn’t nearly so surefooted here, but he captures some nice Rockwellian images of mid-century middle America, and his dramatizations of Garth’s yarnspinning, which give us a kid’s-eye view of Hub’s adventures, are fun.

McCanlies is also not above using Garth and Hub’s more conventional pets—a quartet of adorable dogs and a self-satisfied-looking pig—for beguiling reaction shots. And, if you’re willing to cut Secondhand Lions the slack required to enjoy it, you’ll enjoy these critters, too. I certainly did.

The DVD: The disc offers the choice between widescreen and fullscreen. The extras are plentiful but, on the whole, I'm afraid they're also rather yawn-inducing.

They consist principally of a commentary track by director Tim McCanlies, a large bundle of deleted or alternate scenes that mostly deserved to be deleted or altered and a brief—though admittedly startling—demonstration of how many of the backdrops in the flashback sequences are computer-generated.

There are also three production documentaries. One of these, Secondhand Lions: One Screenplay’s Wild Ride in Hollywood, is moderately interesting, tracing the decade-long route the script took before the cameras ever rolled—it reveals, for instance, that the stars considered for the roles of the uncles at one time or another included Robert Redford and Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and Tommy Lee Jones.

The other two shorts, On the Set With ‘Secondhand Lions’ and Haley Joel Osment: An Actor Comes of Age, are promotional fluff, though the latter does give us a look at the tall, deep-voiced, post-pubescent Osment. Wasn't he a little kid 10 minutes ago?

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