"...For every actor, the great challenge is portraying a character that is different than oneself. Haley Joel Osment (who you may remember from the Sixth Sense) plays a shy, directionless boy, devoid of strong male role models. Nothing could be further from the truth. In interviews, Osment is a winsome and articulate 15-year-old.

Citing his own father as his biggest role model, Osment told me that he played the role of Walter by doing the opposite of how he was raised. "Knowing what it was like to have a solid role model and to really grow up the correct way," he said. "For Walter, I had to really flip it around and take it all away and know what it was like to have the loss of that. Or never know what it was like."

Osment's costar Michael Caine picked up on this point when he said, "We are always reading in the papers, and we know that families are falling apart and for a massive amount of people-both in this country and my country — in families the father is not present and the problems that has caused with the children."

Caine points to Osment's performance as a supreme example of the importance of the film. "Haley is such a wonderful actor because he has an incredible family," he told me. "And his parents are wonderful and his father is there for him all day long-every day. And that is what you get: A rounded, great kid with a talent, as opposed to the character that he plays who is really lost and sad."

"...Secondhand Lions is the kind of fun-filled family film that was created in the arena of brokenness to show how disjointed lives can be put into some kind of sensible order with love, virtue, and truth. "Honor and virtue are relevant to any time," Osment says. "They are especially important today. Because we really don't concentrate on them as much anymore."