Secondhand
Lions, directed by Tim McCanlies, is about a couple of
wacky oldtimers and their nephew. Single mother Mae (played
by Kyra Sedgwick) has dreams of a husband, a house, and
being a homemaker, but she foolishly throws herself at
the first man who comes along and pays the price. However,
her adorable son Walter (played by Haley Joel Osment),
who is just past puberty, also suffers the consequences.
One day in the summer, she packs up for a trip to Las Vegas
but lies to her son, as usual, saying that she is enrolling
in a school in Fort Worth to learn to be a court reporter.
Walter is to stay with his two bachelor uncles, Garth (played
by Michael Caine) and Hub (played by Robert Duvall), who
live in a ramshackle house in the middle of Texas; his
mother's only instruction is to find out, based on a rumor,
where they have hidden untold millions. Walter is disconsolate,
even frightened, at being abandoned to two eccentric senior
citizens in a house with no telephone or television, and
he soon tries to run away to call his mother, thereby discovering
that she is not where she said. The two uncles then coax
him back to live with them, and in time he becomes fond
of both men because they continue to explore life in unexpected
ways. Their tomfoolery includes dispersing traveling salespersons
with noisy shotguns, buying an aging lion discarded by
a zoo, outfighting bad boys dressed in leather, scaring
away gold-digging relatives, and assembling parts of a
propeller airplane. The wild one is Hub. Garth provides
emotional support to Walter, who cries a few times in the
film but rarely talks (as his baritone voice is clearly
not that of a naïve little boy). Garth also tells
Walter a fascinating story of their lives, which became
interesting after they went to Europe in 1914 on the eve
of World War I. Drunk in Marseilles one night, they ended
up shanghaied--on a ship bound for North Africa, where
they joined the Foreign Legion and fought in both world
wars and several minor wars. Garth also tells him about
a Princess Jasmine (played by Emmanuelle Vaugier), the
one love in Hub's life. Jasmine was betrothed to a sheik,
who in turn tried to eliminate his rival, offering a handsome
reward for his capture. Garth then captured Hub, got the
monetary reward, and Hub fought his way to freedom. Jasmine,
however, died in childbirth, presumably accounting for
Hub's occasional somnambulism. Although Walter finds the
story too fantastic to be believed, he later discovers
where the two uncles have indeed hidden a large sum of
money. When Mae returns to collect her son, she is accompanied
by her new boyfriend Stan (played by Nicky Kitt), who in
turn demands that Walter reveal where the money is hidden.
Stan, a private detective, claims that evidence reveals
that the two are notorious bank robbers. Walter refuses
to talk, whereupon Stan starts to beat him up. The lion,
then in a last gasp of life, overpowers Stan, who is so
mauled that bandages applied at the hospital make him appear
to be a mummy. Nevertheless, Mae drives away with a fully
recovered Stan and Walter. As the car speeds down the road,
Walter realizes that he would rather live with his uncles
than with his flighty mother and her neverending assortment
of loser boyfriends. Earlier, Walter received a lecture
from Hub about how to live an honorable life, but that
was only part of his "how to grow up to be a man" speech.
After returning to live with his uncles, he undoubtedly
heard the rest of the speech. Years pass, and Walter is
a young adult working somewhere in a city. One day, the
uncles die in a crash of the airplane that Hub built. Walter
returns to their home to pay his respects when a helicopter
appears out of nowhere, and two strangers disembark. The
coming-of-age film then delightfully tries to tidy up the
major loose end of the story. MH
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