HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS (1995)
A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2003
Once upon a time, the author of this review used to live in a country that, by some strange coincidence, had few national holidays exactly on the same time of year as USA. One of such examples was November 29th - Republic Day, a holiday which was popular for the same reasons as Thanksgiving in USA - some sort of preview for the real holiday season at the end of year. However, few people outside USA are aware of the Thanksgiving, because Hollywood filmmakers generally prefer Christmas as more universal holiday. One of the rare films that deal with Thanksgiving is HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS, 1995 drama directed by Jodie Foster.
Thanksgiving might be holiday for, but for the protagonist, Chicago art restaurateur Claudia "Clyde" Larson (played by Holly Hunter), it hardly represents a time for joy. She has just lost her job, her teenage daughter Kit (played by Claire Danes) informs her that she is about to lose virginity with her boyfriend and the worst part is only awaits her - annual family gathering in her parents' house in Baltimore. Claudia flies to Baltimore and reunites with her overbearing mother Adele (played by Anne Bancroft), spaced out father Henry (played by Charles Durning), eccentric aunt Gladys (played by Geraldine Chaplin), uptight yuppie sister Joanne (played by Cynthia Stevenson) and her equally uptight husband Walter (played by Steve Guttenberg). The most enigmatic participant in the gathering is Leo Fish (played by Dylan McDermott), handsome young man who accompanies Claudia's gay brother Tommy (played by Robert Downey Jr.). While the unsettled family scores lead to escalation of verbal violence Claudia, among all of its chaos, discovers that Leo Fish isn't gay at all and that he might actually be attracted to her.
As a person known for her unconventional lifestyle and views on family, Jodie Foster looked like a good choice for directing a film that took subversive approach towards petit bourgeoisie concept of family. Respectable cast of character actors also looked like a guarantee of strong, intense drama. Unfortunately, the script by W.D. Richter, based on the short story by Chris Radant, suffered from the mistake which is too common in Hollywood film these days - too much meandering between comedy and drama. In other words, the characters in this film are too quirky to be taken seriously, while the film lacks the proper dose of humour to be funny. The worst example is character of Tommy, probably designed as some kind of comic relief on the paper - on the screen he comes as obnoxious prankster (and Robert Downey Jr.'s addiction problems probably didn't help either). At the end, Foster loses the grip on the film and allows it to be overlong and she also succumbs to the usual Hollywood cliches of obligatory romantic subplot and lame happy ending. However, quality of the actors and few interesting scenes are the reason why HOME FOR HOLIDAYS is watchable, but there are hundreds of films that have covered the same territory with better results.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
Review written on January 19th 2003
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://www.purger.com/users/drax/reviews.htm - Movie Reviews in English http://www.ofcs.org - Online Film Critics Society
========== X-RAMR-ID: 33905 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 835191 X-RT-TitleID: 1066169 X-RT-AuthorID: 1307 X-RT-RatingText: 4/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews