HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS. Directed by Jodie Foster; written by W.D. Richter; produced by Peggy Rajski and Jodie Foster for Paramount. Starring Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning and Dylan McDermott. Rated PG-13.
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Home for the Holidays is an antic comedy/drama that captures the ambiguous flavor of occasional family togetherness with fair accuracy.
The emphasis is on the comedy and it delivers some really good laughs, although not all the gags work, by any means, and a few are downright stinkers. As wild as the characters seem, most of them, played by an ensemble of quite talented actors, manage to become at least a little more than caricatures. And there's an undercurrent of warmth and solidarity to them in spite of their differences of temperament and opinion that will seem familiar, I suspect, to lots of viewers as the real holidays approach.
Hunter is Claudia, the main point-of-view character. She gets into the holiday spirit by losing her job just prior to leaving for a family visit she dreads. She makes a panicky call from the plane to gay brother Tommy (Downey) pleading for him to change his plans and join her at the family hearth. Fortunately, for both her sake and ours, he does, since Downey is responsible for the lion's share of the movie's humor (as well as, however, a few of those stinkers).
Claudia's parents (Durning and Bancroft) are eccentric but loving, and not in the saccharine kind of way that late-middle-age parents often are in the movies. They are sweet, in their way, and there's no doubt of their affection for each other and their progeny. But there's also no doubt that any sane child wouldn't stay that way long if he or she were still living at home.
The home itself is a real treat to "visit." Stuffed absolutely full of so many of the kinds of knick-knacks that parents seem compelled to collect, it feels both familiar and somewhat surrealistic. You can't help but wonder what happens to all that stuff when the filming is over. (The victuals prepared for 10 days of shooting Thanksgiving dinners were, the studio assures us, passed on to food banks.)
Home for the Holidays may or may not be a good warm-up to the season for you. It's an entertaining, enjoyable and mostly well-made movie, but if you're expecting an especially stressful holiday, it might be best to wait until after the get-together to see it. It's easier to laugh at painful subjects in retrospect than in prospect.
November 16, 1995