"Mind your business Homer. Mind your business." -- Mr. Rose to Homer Wells

Director Lasse Hallstrom (What's Eating Gilbert Grape?) shepherds this John Irving tale through 131 meandering minutes on the big screen. Toby Maguire stars as Homer Wells, one of the older orphans at the St Cloud's orphanage in Maine. Michael Caine is doctor who runs the orphanage while carrying on a brisk trade as an OB/GYN who handles births and abortions with equal ease.

Larch trains Homer until the youth is as skilled as most medical doctors, even though Homer never went to high school or college. But when a striking young woman named Candy (Charlize Theron) and her boyfriend Wally (Paul Rudd) come to the orphanage to get the woman an abortion, Homer decides it's time to leave and leaves with them. He lands a position picking apples from the trees owned by Candy's mother.

Delroy Lindo is Mr. Rose, the leader of the crew that lives in the Cider House, picks the apples and makes the cider. Homer is the only white, but his innocence and naivete allow him to befriend his fellow workers quite easily, including Mr. Rose's daughter, Rose (Erykah Badu).

Wally departs to fly planes in World War II and left alone, Homer and Candy fall in love. Although one wonders just how much in love Candy ever was with Homer, given the depth of her feelings for Wally. Wally will ultimately return and reclaim Candy's love, although whether it was really his, or he won her by default thanks to his being crippled in a crash landing is also never quite made clear.

When Rose's pregnancy reaches a critical stage, Homer has to make the most difficult choice in his life. Whether or not to mind his true business, his ability to give her the abortion she wants very badly.

I was disappointed by this movie, and waited to pen my review to ensure that the things that disappointed me weren't coloring my judgment of the film as a whole. On reflection, they aren't. This movie just isn't as good as everyone says it is, at least not in this writer's opinion.

The reason for my disappointment is that from the trailers and commercials, I expected to see a 'coming of age' tale about Maguire and his romance with Charlize Theron, one of the sexiest young actresses around. What I got instead involved abortion, incest and was much darker than I'd originally imagined it to be. That Irving penned the tale should have been a clue about what the story really was, but for some reason that didn't click for me.

Many critics have taken issue with the movie's commentary about abortions. What those pundits seem to have forgotten is that this movie was set in the 1940s, when a woman's best option for aborting a fetus might well be a rusty coat hanger. I found the movie's look at abortion to be well-balanced by the differing positions that Homer and Dr. Larch had on the issue.

Michael Caine does give one of the best performances of his career, particularly in the perfection of his delivery of dialogue with an accent that shows no trace of his normal English-accented speech. But Maguire is wooden, almost robotic most of the way through and given the amount of time he is center of the screen, there's just no way to save the picture. Worse yet, because there are so many different things going on at once, we don't get one clear story to follow.

A rental at best.