Z/Web

Another one of those films I wasn’t terribly interested in seeing, but timing meant I saw it, and it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I was worried it’d be a bit smarmy and pretentious and too saccharine for my tastes, but it turned out to be an enjoyable film. The “plot” is about a little boy who goes to live with his two grumpy uncles for the summer in the early 1960s. The old men are rumored to have millions hidden away and thus are pestered by every distant relative and saleperson in the state. Their main activity is sitting on their porch with shotguns to scare away people. The boy’s arrival disturbs their lifestyle and gradually the boy learns to love his uncles and vice versa. Predictable overall, but there are many humorous little sidesteps in the plot — such as when the old men, who used to be in the Foreign Legion in Africa, buy a used lion which they plan to hunt, only to discover it’s so old it won’t even get out of the shipping crate. In the end the lion becomes the boy’s pet (his first). The title refers to the movie’s thought-line of how you don’t throw away a life, implying that the old men (who don’t act their age) are also secondhand lions.

There’s a lot about the story that’s unbelievable (intentionally: we hear fabulous stories about the old men’s past and we’re supposed to wonder how much of it is true), but the genuine performances help ground the film. The direction has some nice touches as well. My favorite was this: when the boy arrives at the uncles’ home, there are “no tresspassing” and other forbidding signs on the long dirt driveway leading to the home. The final sign says “Turn back now!” But at the end, when the boy is being driven away and he doesn’t want to leave, he’s looking longingly out the rear window of the car and we see the signs in the reverse, including the one that screams “Turn back now!” in huge letters — and this time the meaning is completely different. Really cool. Brilliant, in fact.