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Following Holes, Secondhand Lions is the year's second unexpected family movie success story. Haley Joel Osment, Robert Duvall, and Michael Caine are impressing parents with their roles in director Tim McCanlies's whimsical story about a boy who finds much-needed father figures in his two eccentric uncles. The film has comedy, adventure, mystery, wild animals, and hidden treasure. It also has memorable performances, an unpredictable script, and a lot of heart. Last week, Film Forum featured early reviews. This week, more have come in, and so have impressive box office numbers.

At an early screening of the film, I joined other critics from the religious press to chat with Tim McCanlies and his cast. McCanlies does not look like a Hollywood filmmaker. He's an exuberant, down-to-earth Texan who clearly loves storytelling.

"I've been a writer for fifteen years in Hollywood and I had all these pent-up things I wanted to say," he says, referring to the many lessons learned by the young hero. "I guess I crammed it all into one script."

Young Walter is just the latest in a long tradition of big-screen kids who are either orphans or single-parented. When a critic asked McCanlies why this film and his previous family movie, an animated feature called The Iron Giant, have both been about fatherless boys, he explained. "When I was growing up, my father was in the military, so I was on my own a lot. People joke and ask, 'Why do kids in animated films have no parents, or only one parent?' And the glib answer is, "Well, that's one less person you have to animate."

There are a lot of themes weaving through Lions. Did the director have one central idea he was trying to communicate? "In this case, I was really trying to get at what it is that men teach boys. This is a story about men that are sort of used up—'secondhand lions' if you will—and this kid who really needs them and how they save each other."

At the centerpiece of the film, Robert Duvall's character, Uncle Hub, talks about ethics—but the audience is only privy to half of the speech. Several of us wondered what was in the rest of that speech. McCanlies sighed, shrugged, and said, "Well, it took me a long time to write that first half of the speech. What you hear is just a small part—I think it's really an eight-hour speech. It was all I could do to come up with the part you heard in the movie. If you just give a speech [in a movie]—'Always be a good person!'—it can be really boring. It needed to be something [Walter] really needed to hear, in a specific rather than a general way."

And yet, McCanlies' morals never reach beyond simple ethics of kindness or faith in other people. "Because my father wasn't around much, I learned a lot of my lessons from books and movies. … Phillip Marlowe [is] a very moral man in an amoral world, who sets his own code. So when I was trying to figure on what this movie is really about, and circled in on 'What Men Teach Boys.' As I circled that, [the speech] seemed to be about 'You should have your own sense of honor.' Like Raymond Chandler. Even if you're in an amoral world. Even if people are around you are succeeding from cutting corners and cheating on their taxes and screwing over their neighbors. You should set your own moral code. You can't argue with a kid that money and power don't mean anything, because they do. It's easy for a kid to believe that people are no good, but you should still act as if they are, and you should believe that they are."

An interesting, if frustrating, philosophy. I wanted to ask McCanlies how we are to know good from evil if every man is free to "set his own moral code." (Duvall echoed McCanlies' sentiment, saying that he would like to teach each young man to "be a law unto himself.") Does he mean to suggest that there is no established moral code to be found and agreed upon? Are we being encouraged to develop something illusory? I also wanted the director to say more about the film's central message—"Believe in good things even if they don't seem to be true."

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47