Word: tobey
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...opening scene is an antebellum wedding for the wealthy, giving the film a Gone With The Wind air. Commenting that weddings are just another "peculiar institution," two boys on the verge of manhood, Jake "Dutchie" Roedel (Tobey Maguire) and Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich) suddenly decide they must become active participants in the preservation of the Southern way of life. Yet this brief conversation fails to justify the movie's dramatic tension. For Roedel and Chiles, risking life and limb is simply one more game. The charade is pervasive, as Ulrich looks entirely out of place in his Civil...
...novel becomes, in his screenplay, a small epic with subtle strengths. The setting is harsh--a Maine orphanage in the early '40s, with war and sexual abuse looming--but the mood is warm and precise, as a flinty, laudanum-addicted doctor (the excellent Michael Caine) tutors his brightest charge (Tobey Maguire, the most watchful of young actors) to be his protege. Hallstrom, here as in My Life as a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, lets the characters carry the story without allowing the actors to push too hard. This is a film with the wisdom...
...Missouri bushwhackers, Jake Roedel (watchful Tobey Maguire) and Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich, parading what may be star quality or merely attitude), start out with a few ideals--war's first casualty. They also serially entertain the young widow Sue Lee (Jewel, the singer). They are idiot savants at making war--without flair or even instinct but with an awful proficiency. At making love they are just idiots. They haven't had the example of the movies or even mush literature to teach them courtship. They hide their feelings as clumsily as they express them. "So, do you want...
...appeared with a surprisingly modest brunette dye job which only partially belied the model-quality good looks that garnered her roles in both "American" movies this summer, both this one and American Pie. With unshaven, not-quite-ratty stubble that gave him the look of a leaner, more thoughtful Tobey Maguire, Wes Bentley (the intense drug dealer and video voyeur Ricky Fitts) stayed mostly quiet during our encounter. But, in the end, it was precocious, prickly Thora Birch-- still 17, no matter what you read--who made the most impression on me. Sweatered in the heat, she told me about...
...plot contrivance for this effect is acceptable, if a little clunky. Introverted teenager David (Tobey Maguire), a divorce child of the '90s, immerses himself in reruns of Pleasantville, a '50s TV show somewhere between "Leave it to Beaver" and "The Donna Reed Show." For him, it offers an escape from his less-than-idyllic real life to a haven where the weather is always sunny, everybody is gainfully employed and lives in a spick-and-span house with a white picket fence, and the main characters enjoy the kind of secure, comfortable family life he's never known. His obsession...