I've been seeing a lot of silent films lately, in which incredibly melodramatic developments are a way of life: What matters is not that they're unlikely or sentimental, but that the movie presents them with sincerity and finds the right tone. There are people who will find Simon's big scene contrived and cornball but, as I said, it all depends on the state of mind you assign to the picture. If God has made the bake sale a priority, we're all in a lot of trouble.'' All of this is a scene-raiser for the melodramatic climax, in which it appears that God has perhaps indeed made Simon a priority.
Russell is asking God's help for a fund-raiser, and Simon stands up on his pew to announce, "I doubt if God is interested in our church activities.
SIMON BIRCH LICENSE
Simon uses his size as a license to say exactly what he thinks on all occasions, loudly and clearly, as when the Rev. Simon's dwarfism doesn't prevent him from going everywhere and doing everything, and even taking his turn at bat in a Little League game when he finally does gets a hit, there are tragic consequences.
(The last time Rebecca met someone on the Boston & Maine, her mother recalls, she came home pregnant.) Simon and Joe occupy a world of their own, swimming and boating and slipping invisibly around town. Russell ( David Strathairn), the local minister Grandma Wenteworth ( Dana Ivey), Rebecca's mother Miss Leavey ( Jan Hooks), the Sunday school teacher who endures Simon's theological insights, and Ben ( Oliver Platt), a man Rebecca meets on the train and brings home for supper. They include Simon's loutish parents, who don't like him the Rev. The other key characters could all be from Norman Rockwell paintings. "You're already a bastard, might as well be an enlightened one.'' Rebecca is a sunny, loving mother whose one lapse has, if anything, improved her character. "I don't understand why she doesn't just tell you,'' Simon says. Joe is a boy without a father his mother, Rebecca ( Ashley Judd), steadfastly refuses to name names. If you were me, you'd know, too.'' Joe and Simon are drawn together because they're both misfits. Girls don't kiss baby turtles.'' How do you know, asks Joe. When Joe tells him a local girl finds him cute, he sniffs, "She means cute like a baby turtle is cute. He is very short and very cute, and very wise about the fact of his dwarfism. Played by Ian Michael Smith with remarkable cockiness, he's the smartest person in Sunday school and possibly in town. Gerard as Lewis' great rival Elvis, and Steve Allen as himself.Joe is your average kid.
Featured in the cast are Alec Baldwin as Jerry's cousin Jimmy Swaggart (the same!), Michael St. Otherwise, Quaid is terrific as Lewis (expertly lip-synching to the original records,) and Ryder is equally good as the long-suffering Myra. After establishing a brisk, satirical tone through most of the proceedings, the film plummets into heavy dramatics in its final portions, jarring disastrously with all that has gone before. When it is revealed that Myra is only 13 years old, Lewis is condemned as a molester and pervert by the public (his disastrous tour of England during this crisis is depicted in hilarious Tex Avery fashion). Along the way, he falls in love with his second cousin, Myra (Winona Ryder), eventually marrying the girl. The story takes place during the years 1956 through 1958, as Lewis rises to the top of the charts with such hits as "Crazy Arms," "A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," and the title tune. As played by Dennis Quaid, "the killer" is a very mixed-up individual: a saintly sinner, a world-wise naïf, a skilled performer with zero sense of discipline, a loving husband who uses his wife for a punching bag. Until its last ten minutes or so, this filmed biography of controversial recording star Jerry Lee Lewis plays like a live-action cartoon.
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