Interesting choice, and I say choice advisedly
Movie we watched at the weekend (one of a batch of DVDs partner recently ordered online):
The Cider House Rules (1999).
Not, I think, a movie I would have spontaneously chosen to watch of my own accord.
Have not read the novel upon which it is based, and which, from a brief visit to Goodreads, appears to be much longer and have lots of subplottiness.
The movie has lots of lingering scenic shots and in the earlier parts, ickle orphan faces.
The main story is coming-of-age narrative of Bland Young Man. Okay, it also has Michael Caine as the head of the orphanage and a humane eccentric ether-addict. Let's face it, one could probably watch Michael Caine leafing through the pages of the telephone directory without even reading it, no?
I felt I should give the movie more points for being pro-abortion - Caine as Dr Wilbur Larch is both taking in unwanted children and preventing their births by performing at the date (c. outbreak of WWII) very illegal abortions, rather to the (initial) horror of his protege, Bland Young Man.
This is largely presented as he is humane saviour -
Except this is very much humane saviour of largely faceless agencyless women, and even the women who do get to have some individual story are pretty passive/victims of awful circumstance.
I'm not sure I like that. It cunningly gets round all that problematic stuff about women making choices and decisions and owning their own bodies and makes it about a Heroic (if dope-addicted) Man saving them from their fates. There is one instance where a woman has 'done something to herself' involving a crochet-hook, and she dies.
The implication is, also that he is doing this entirely free and gratis, and while, from my study of the history of abortion, a lot of the people practising it, medical and non-medical, felt they were performing a service in spite of the strictures of the law (cf the scene in Holloway towards the end of Vera Drake), most of them were also getting paid something. Which might bring a little more ambiguity into the picture (in Vera Drake, saintly Vera wasn't being paid: her dodgy intermediary who was making the connection was, though).
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