If you haven’t seen The Cider House Rules, please note that there are spoilers below.
I think it was a nurse, or a nanny who adopted Fuzzy. Someone who could take care of him because they had a better breathing machine than the one that Dr. Larch built for him. So, I think we should be happy for Fuzzy, ok? He found a family. Goodnight, Fuzzy.
Teenage Kieran Culkin was on the screen, saying these lines as an orphan named Buster. Buster was telling a white lie to a room of younger orphans about their friend Fuzzy, a sickly orphan who died. The idea was to tell them that Fuzzy was adopted, to spare them of knowing the truth, but Fuzzy was their friend, and he had been sick since he was born, so I think they knew. So, they let Buster tell them the adoption story. The next shot showed Michael Caine as Dr. Larch, the father figure to these orphans, leaning against the wall outside their sleeping quarters. He was crying.
So was I.
I was sitting in one of the small auditoriums in The Carlton Cinema in Toronto. It was either January or February in the year 2000. My new-ish friend Kate was with me. She was fun and kind and smart and genuine and she had that infectious energy you just wanted to be around. Kate and I had become instant friends the summer before, when we worked as cater-waiters on dinner cruise boats at the harbourfront. Now it was winter, and the number of deep chats and fun outings we’d shared since our days serving chafing dish chicken and cruising the Toronto Harbour were too many to count.
The Carlton was known for screening independent movies and foreign films, so you could usually rely on it to play dramas that focused more on acting and less on spaceships and special effects. The movie we saw that day was certainly devoid of spaceships. It was The Cider House Rules, a drama directed by Lasse Hallström and based on a book by John Irving.
When you meet a new friend, you never know how long they’ll be in your life. Sometimes it’s just for a summer, other times it’s for a decade or longer. The well-known, trite but true saying tells us that friends are either with us for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. What I didn’t know yet, but certainly had an intuition about on that snowy, winter day in that small cinema in Toronto, was that I was at the movies with a lifetime friend.
If you’re sad that it’s already September, you might like these bittersweet films:
In The Cider House Rules, Michael Caine plays the supporting role of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an OBGYN who delivers babies and performs abortions at an orphanage in 1940s rural Maine. Tobey Maguire stars as Homer Wells, the young man who was never adopted, and whom Dr. Larch spared from the war. Over the years, Homer becomes like a son to Dr. Larch, as well as his medical protégé. Charlize Theron plays Candy, a woman whose boyfriend drives her to the orphanage for an abortion. The boyfriend, Wally, a military airman played by Paul Rudd, is evading his father’s dreams for him to take over the family cidery. Homer is seeking a new adventure, and Wally is seeking a way to appease his father and return to the army, so Homer decides to leave the orphanage to work at the cidery. A lot happens between the day Homer drives away with Candy and Wally and the day he ultimately returns to the orphanage. I won’t recount the entire plot to you here, I’ll just say that it’s a really good movie and you should watch it (again).
In truth, I probably chose this movie because of Tobey Maguire.
If Leo (DiCaprio) was the Timothée Chalamet of the late ‘90s/early 2000s, Tobey was probably the Lucas Hedges — slightly less famous but still just as serious and thoughtful, often choosing films that were character-driven and emotional. Keep in mind this was before Tobey donned the red spider suit. He was in his sensitive-indie-drama-it-boy phase, having been in films like The Ice Storm and Pleasantville. I was an English Lit. major taking film classes with a tendency to fall for introverted, artsy types. While Tobey was embodying Homer Wells and making me swoon, Michael Caine — to whom I was carelessly paying less attention to at the time — was delivering what would end up being an Oscar-winning performance.
Back to the tears.
Huddled together with our winter coats around us like blankets, Kate and I sat in the Carlton and bawled like babies when Fuzzy died, and when Homer came back to the orphanage, and when he said to the boys in the tradition of Dr. Larch, “Goodnight you Princes of Maine, you kings of New England”.
It was a good cry. And good-crying in a movie theatre with someone can really bond you together. I don’t remember the movie snacks we had that day (if I had to guess — Kate: winegums, me: Twizzlers), but I remember the feelings. The feelings the movie evoked, the feeling of bonding with a new friend, and the feeling of being 22. I’m happy to say that the bond Kate and I formed movie by movie, conversation by conversation is still going strong even though I left Toronto 15 years ago. I suppose, in some part, that we have Fuzzy and Buster and Homer and The Carlton to thank for that.
See you at the movies,
Heather
What are your movie memories?
Leave a comment or drop me a line and let me know — your movie memory could end up in a future post.
I still haven’t seen enough Michael Caine movies, but I did like The Prestige.
If you need another bittersweet movie with a Culkin in it, I recommend one here: