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After recently squirming through most of Kim Ki-duk's shocking film The Isle, it's downright refreshing to see a South Korean film that is so saccharine, I'm not sure I'd be able to take it under normal conditions. Talk about two complete extremes - The Isle was about murder, whores and installing fishhooks where the sun don't shine, while The Way Home is a PG-rated family film about the relationship between a young boy and his grandmother (and it outgrossed The Fellowship of the Ring back in the KOR).
Essentially one of those timeless tales that finds the New World learning a thing or two from the Old World, Home is about a cute-as-a-button but incessantly bratty kid named Sang-woo (Yu Seung-ho) whose mother (Dong Hyo-hee) sticks him on a bus and sends him to live with her mom for a spell while she tries to find a job. Imagine Sang-woo's shock when, after spending his entire life amidst the hubbub of Seoul, he's dropped off in front of a dusty one-room shack on the edge of nowhere to live with a woman who looks like a peasant and is perpetually bent into a 90-degree angle. And that's to say nothing of the bad television reception, or having to crap in a bowl and sleep on the floor with a pillow made out of wood.
Armed with his own supply of Spam and Coca-Cola, as well as a noisy handheld videogame, Sang-woo immediately digs in his heels and seems eager to be a major pain in the ass, but his grandmother (Kim Eul-boon) just smiles and keeps doling out the unconditional love. On top of everything else, she's mute and either retarded or incredibly simple, which doesn't exactly help her and Sang-woo see eye-to-eye on even one issue. She's a pumpkin farmer; he's a dog-kicking, shoe-pissing, heirloom-trading monster who draws crude - yet very funny - anti-grandmother hieroglyphics on the shack's walls.
Yet despite their obvious and seemingly insurmountable differences, we all know the two will be as thick as thieves before Home ends. It starts out simple enough, with Sang-woo helping her thread a needle and Grandma sacrificing what one can only imagine is a healthy chunk of money to buy him a chicken (only to have him pitch a fit because it isn't like KFC). Then Sang-woo turns too quickly and too easily, and with virtually no reason, other than writer-director Lee Jeong-hyang possibly having to meet some kind of weird requirement to have Home clock in at under 90 minutes.
Yu Seung-ho is flawlessly irritating as Sang-woo but still manages to be an effective, likable foil in Home's story. The 78-year-old Kim Eul-boon has a much tougher role, considering that she has no lines and must communicate solely with her eyes - plus the fact that she's never even seen a movie, let alone starred in one. Don't confuse this Home with Zhang Yimou's The Road Home, which was nearly as short, but just as beautifully photographed.
1:22 - PG for mild thematic elements and language
========== X-RAMR-ID: 34227 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 846091 X-RT-TitleID: 1117943 X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146 X-RT-RatingText: 6/10
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