Summary:
Reviews the film, The Cider House Rules. Describes how the film relates to the John Irving novel of the same title. Concludes that the movie is really only a fragment of that novel, scaled down to conventional movie length, with numerous characters discarded and the story's time frame compressed from decades into a couple of years.
It doesn't take a cryptographer to decipher the meanings in John Irving's sprawling picaresque allegories. But a reader who wants to savor them must be willing to suspend a psychoanalytic view of human nature descended from Freud through Oprah and surrender to an imagination that is more Dickensian than Freudian. Once you give up those expectations, a visit to the world according to Irving is a little like touring a parallel universe where fate is determined not so much by abusive parents as by wondrous tragicomic events beyond the realm of psychology.
I can't think of a better filmmaker to guide us through that world than Lasse Hallstrom, the director of "My Life as a Dog" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape"," two grown-up movies that share Mr. Irving's adult-child sensibility. In Mr. Hallstrom's lovely adaptation (with.....
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