Secondhand Lions (2003)

Secondhand Lions arrives from 2003 with the gentle momentum of a porch swing, telling of a shy boy deposited on a Texas farm in 1962 with two great-uncles who fire shotguns at traveling salesmen and keep a fortune hidden under the barn. The picture is wholesome, schmaltzy, and entirely comfortable in its period setting, which functions as a kind of cultural quarantine. Nothing in 1962 Texas is asked to answer for contemporary sensibilities, and the film does not volunteer.

The cast is white to a man, and the lone gesture toward elsewhere arrives through a tall-tale flashback to the French Foreign Legion, where Hub marries an Arab princess named Jasmine who has been promised to a powerful sheik. She exists to be beautiful, endangered, and then dead in childbirth. The sheik is a scimitar and a grudge. This is Orientalist adventure folklore of an old and unexamined kind, and the film engages no racial question beyond the decorative. The uncles are reclusive bachelors, a detail the screenplay never considers worth exploring, and the women in the story amount to a gold-digging mother and a doomed damsel. Walter is called introverted, which the film treats as shyness to be outgrown.

What remains is a mild anti-materialist streak. The relatives circle the hidden fortune, the salesmen get shot at, and the moral lands on spending money while you are alive to enjoy it. Hub delivers a speech to four greasers about growing up and being men, and the closing line confirms that the uncles really lived. It is sermonizing of the gentlest, most grandfatherly sort, a moral offered with a hand on the shoulder. The film means well. It simply means well in a language that has since gone out of fashion.