What gives life value?

Secondhand Lions Rating: PG

Secondhand Lions is the funny and honest story of a boy who spends a summer with his long-lost, eccentric uncles. Walter (Haley Joel Osment from The Sixth Sense and Pay It Forward) is dropped off by his mother at the Texas ranch of Uncle Hub (Robert Duvall) and Uncle Garth (Michael Caine). What appears to be a dreadful experience at first turns into an opportunity for Walter to think about what gives life value.

Walter doesn’t initially understand why his mother wants to leave him with two men who have been suspiciously missing for the past 40 years. But when she informs him the uncles have a secret fortune stashed away he figures out her ulterior motive. “You want them to like me so they’ll die and leave us their money?”

The mother values the uncles because she thinks their money will solve her problems. She sees them not for who they are, but for what they have. Ultimately, she is really not that much different from all the salespeople who visit the uncles hoping for a chance at some of their money.

Walter forms an unlikely and compassionate bond with the oldtimers who claim not to know much about kids. Perhaps surprising even themselves about how much life has taught them, they begin to teach the boy about their experiences. They buy a lion that has outlived its usefulness in the circus. The lion mirrors Uncle Hub’s fear of becoming useless in his old age.

Like Walter, we’re not sure whether we can believe these two uncles as they relate their life accounts. Their stories about fighting with the French Foreign Legion and how Hub’s swashbuckling heroic acts got their untold millions from an unsuspecting sheik seem incredible.

Hub tells Walter his stories are true if Walter decides to believe them. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not . . . a man has to believe in it.” Here, the story walks a tight line with relativism. In the end, Walter is left with the choice to believe the stories based on the character of his uncles.

Even in old age, Hub and Garth find themselves indispensable in being uncles (fathers, really) to Walter. And the lion, though useless to the circus, finds significance in becoming an unlikely family pet. Secondhand Lions reminds us of the importance of examining the standards we use in assigning value to others.

Paul H. Boge, a writer and engineer, attends North Kildonan MB Church,Winnipeg. His first book, The Chicago Healer, will be available in 2004.