Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #214 Mr. Rice's Secret (1999)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of the late Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
Over the course of my leisurely, patron-funded ramble through the complete filmography of David Bowie I have continuously found myself asking the question, with various degrees of urgency and bewilderment, “Why, for the love of all that is good and holy, is the legendary David Bowie in this half-assed piece of shit?”
I found myself asking that question while watching the underwhelming crime drama B.U.S.T.E.D. It once again entered my mind watching Bowie’s inexplicable cameo in the god-awful Bandslam. And you better believe that I spent the entirety of the muddled 9/11 online bubble melodrama August wondering why Bowie wasted some of his all too brief time on earth blessing such a nothing of a movie with his majestic presence.
Bowie made some movies that will always hold a place of pride and distinction in the hearts and souls of his rabid fans, all-time classics like Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Labyrinth, and he made some bullshit movies so random and obscure that even his biggest fans are, at best, only vaguely aware they exist.
The maudlin 1999 melodrama Mr. Rice’s Secret falls into that unfortunate second category of movies David Bowie appeared in that are so flimsy and unseen that they barely exist despite boasting the presence of one of the most revered and important artists in the history of the universe.
Mr. Rice’s Secret is a simultaneously half-baked and overwrought combination of Stand by Me, The Sandlot and The Book of Henry that gives Bowie star billing for a brief if central role as the titular guru, a wise disseminator of life lessons who teaches Owen Waters (Bill Switzer) a boy dying of Cancer that, in a line repeated so often and so earnestly it becomes the film’s equivalent to “With great power comes great responsibility, “It’s what you DO in life that counts!”
Not even Bowie can make schmaltzy dialogue like “You shouldn’t hate anybody! Usually when somebody hates someone it’s because they don’t understand them! Chances are, if you allow yourself a chance to get to know them, you’ll actually find something unique and special about everyone!” sound like anything other than Pollyanna horse shit, Successories minus the corporate poetry.
During his limited time onscreen Mr. Rice talks repeatedly about being the best friend of a 12 year old boy he is not related to but has an intense emotional connection with all the same. Because the devastatingly handsome Bowie was such an inherently sexy performer there’s an unfortunate sexual charge to some of his scenes with his terminally ill child BFF.
If Mr. Rice’s Secret were a very different kind of movie and Mr. Rice had a much different, much darker secret, it would be easy to see the much older man giving a twelve year old elaborate gifts and telling him that they’re very special people, great men, really, who share a unique understanding, as a form of grooming.
But Mr. Rice is not, thank God, a pedophile, although that would almost invariably have resulted in a more interesting movie. Instead Mr. Rice is a goddamn saint, a twinkly-eyed dispenser of aphorisms who didn’t need to die to become an angel, but went ahead and died anyway for extra sappiness.
Owen consequently has to navigate his much older friend’s death, his own Cancer and a middle school ecosystem so perversely, unbelievably cruel that it singles out CHILDREN DYING OF CANCER for special punishment and abuse.
For you see, Owen is not the only member of his peer group who is dying of Cancer. Simon (Richard de Klerk) has an even more severe form of Cancer and is bald from chemotherapy.
Owen’s parents want their son to befriend Simon but Owen angrily and repeatedly insists that he’s NOTHING like Simon and being a child, treats the less popular, more socially awkward boy with a level of cruelty that would be unconscionable even if he were not DYING OF CANCER.
Mr. Rice’s Secret tugs mercilessly and incompetently at the heartstrings, particularly with a score that never lets audiences forget for a moment, that they are watching something that is supposed to be powerful and profound, inspirational and moving.
Yet it also seems weirdly intent on getting audiences to hate a CHILD DYING OF CANCER by having Owen be so unnecessarily cruel to an even sicker child. Owen is verbally abusive to Simon and then gets the poor, Cancer-stricken tot jumped by a group of his buddies for snitching around the time he digs up Mr. Rice’s grave.
In the tradition of The Book of Henry, Mr. Rice’s Secret is overstuffed and convoluted to an almost comic degree. For example there are not one but two quests.
The first quest involves a series of dares that Owen and his asshole bully buddies must successfully complete in order to wrack up points in an open-ended game of staggering pointlessness.
The second quest is a posthumous sort of scavenger hunt Mr. Rice designed that involves a watch that unravels the mysteries of the universe, the exhumation of Rice’s corpse, a key and finally a potion containing the secret to life itself.
Somewhere in all this hackneyed, overly sentimental hogwash the filmmakers find ample time for fat kid slapstick involving the portly bully suffering comic humiliations and MULTIPLE scenes of angry children attacking Cancer-stricken moppets as a group.
Mr. Rice’s Secret is perversely mean-spirited and soft and squishy at the same time, a movie that wants desperately to be warm and fuzzy, yet revolves around a protagonist who is less flawed or imperfect than downright monstrous.
This was a weird movie to watch after learning that my beloved dog has Lymphoma but it speaks to just how inept it is in its storytelling that I was nevertheless deeply unmoved by its insultingly sappy, superficial treatment of life and death and the importance of living life to the fullest in the long, inescapable shadow of the grave.
Yes, David Bowie sure made a lot of movies of wildly varying levels of quality and ambition. The best that can be said of Mr. Rice’s Secret is that it’s one of them, and that’s less “praise” than simply stating a fact.
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