By many metrics, The Princess Bride is one of the greatest sick-day movies you could ever ask for. It has everything to make you feel better: “Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles.” But what it really comes down to is this: it’s a movie about sick days, and every inch of it feels designed to cheer us up: it’s full of the things worth believing in, and when you’re having a terrible, horrible, no-good, feel-bad day, all of those things are the best medicine.
Though it does things entirely differently, some mystical part of the DNA of The Princess Bride exists within 2003’s Secondhand Lions. It’s a film about telling stories, the power they hold and their ability to give us glimpses of hope in trying times — all of which are part of the beating heart of The Princess Bride. Secondhand Lions chooses a different path by planting a nagging question in our heads with the stories it tells: “What if those stories are true?”
You may not remember Secondhand Lions, and it’s even more likely that you’ve never heard of it, which is baffling considering the talent within. It has three Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe winners/nominees, boasting names like Robert Duvall, Michael Caine, and Haley Joel Osment, who was just a year out of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence upon its release. Yet, it’s barely even well-known enough nearly 20 years later to even qualify as “underrated” — that would imply that it’s rated at all. Set in the ‘50s, it stars Osment (only two years after A.I. Artificial Intelligence) as a 14-year-old named Walter, whose flaky mom, Mae (Kyra Sedgwick), drops him on the doorstep of his reclusive uncles, Garth (Caine) and Hub (Duvall), so that she can enroll in school. How reclusive? Their favorite hobby is sitting on their front porch with loaded shotguns, ready to fire at the traveling salesmen who come looking to peddle their wares to the pair of bachelors.
We realize that Mae’s aims may not be the most truthful relatively early on, in two different moments: first, she sneakily comments to Walter that, as rumor has it, there’s boatloads of cash hidden somewhere on the farm where she drops him. Second, when Walter calls his mother’s school, he discovers that she never enrolled there, and simply couldn’t have. Not only has she left him, but she abandoned him. Mae is also a glimpse into the characters who surround Walter, Garth and Hub: each of them absurd caricatures of irresponsibility, irrationality, greed and selfishness, designed to make the grumpiness and reclusive nature of the uncles feel downright rational. It would be one thing if they were coldly refusing drinks to nuanced characters, but it’s another when far-flung family members barge in unannounced, obnoxious and bratty children in tow, demanding the two update their will to leave them a lil’ chunk of the dough they’re hiding. But, that’s part of what makes Secondhand Lions so comforting: we aren’t left wondering what makes Garth and Hub so fucking grumpy all the time — we need only see the parade of parasites that come sniffing their way.
Walter, though, could have been one of those parasites — after all, part of the reason he was dropped off at their doorstep is because his mother wants him to be an unwitting truffle pig for their stash of cash. But he’s not, and this allows Hub and Garth to begin warming up. Suddenly, they’re willing to give those door-to-door salesmen a moment or two to speak, leading to the purchase of a skeet-shooting machine, of a whole farm’s worth of different vegetables to plant in the garden (which turns out to be all corn), and — our namesake — a retired circus lioness that Walter names Jasmine (more on that name later). Originally ordered by the two as something to hunt, they find themselves powerless to Walter’s pleas to simply let the exhausted old lion live out the rest of its life, unwounded. Jasmine is, in essence, exactly what Garth and Hub are: aging beasts, long past their prime, hoping the end of life will bring some sort of comfort and joy.
Jasmine also represents the past that the pair left behind — namely Hub. As we learn from stories told to us by Garth after Walter catches him sleep-swordfighting, the pair spent their youth in the French Foreign Legion. While in it, Hub fell in love with a beautiful Arab princess named Jasmine, who was betrothed to a powerful Sheik. The two run off together and get married, angering the Sheik, who dispatches assassins to kill Hub, an onslaught that only stops when Hub bests the Sheik in a duel that’s intertwined with the pair gaining the vast fortune that is hidden on the farm.
“Is the story real?” That’s a question that eats away at Walter, until he’s compelled to ask Hub about Jasmine. We see in that moment just how far their relationship has come since the beginning of the film, as he doesn’t really hesitate to confide in him that Jasmine died in childbirth, leading him to rejoin the Legion and fight until he was too old to continue doing so. It makes the bond that the pair have gained feel like it has real gravity: Walter is, in essence, a chance to pass along everything that he never really had the chance to pass on. Those stories are a part of that — but, even more, the stories represent something else.
At its face, Secondhand Lions is a story about letting the world in just a little bit, even if things get uncomfortable or messy or fall apart. But it’s also a story about growing up, and what it takes to be an honorable person. Midway through the film, after he takes on a pack of knife-wielding greasers that attempt to fight him in a diner, we learn that Hub frequently gives a speech dubbed “What Every Boy Needs to Know About Becoming a Man.” We only hear part of that speech, which he gives to Walter in response to his questions about the truth of the story. “Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good, that honor, courage and virtue mean everything. That power and money, money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this: that love…true love never dies. You remember that, boy. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, because those are the things worth believing in.”
Moments like this are why it’s criminal that Secondhand Lions is such an overlooked and completely forgotten film, nearly 20 years on. Caine, Duvall, and Osment don’t turn in revelatory performances, but each one feels like a real person, worthy of spending 111 minutes with. And though its story may not be very groundbreaking, either, it’s a wildly comforting movie that dares to ask about the purpose of truth within the stories we tell, and whether or not it’s more important for the stories we tell to mean something, and to convey messages that are important to internalize. It’s also masculine without being hyper-macho, upholding the kind of old-school life lessons you’d hope everyone could get a long-winded speech about. In a word, it’s wholesome. Maybe that’s why it has fallen into the deep pits of forgotten films — it came out in 2003, six months into the Iraq War, meaning a folksy, feel-good movie with yet another Arab villain was simply not really gonna put butts in seats, no matter how charming it is.
The film ends on a morbid high note: adult Walter receives a call letting him know that his uncles have died — by accidentally crashing their World War I-era prop plane into a barn. That’s grim as hell, right? But wait: a helicopter arrives, carrying the son of the Sheik from Hub and Garth’s stories, who has grown up hearing the exact same stories from the other side. In the hands of another film, it would be cheap. But while it’s mildly saccharine to end there, it also feels like a call to believe that anything is possible, and that the stories that inspire us don’t have to be confined to the realms of fantasy. That doesn’t need to be financially lucrative to be a worthwhile kind of message to bring to the table.
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