Nick-Davis.com: 100 Favorite Films
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#40: Home for the Holidays
(USA, 1995; dir. Jodie Foster; scr. W.D. Richter; cin. Lajos Koltai; with Holly Hunter, Robert Downey, Jr.,
Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, Cynthia Stevenson, Dylan McDermott, Steve Guttenberg, Geraldine Chaplin, Claire Danes)
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One of my favorite costume-props in modern American movies, right up there with Margo Tenenbaum's Izod dresses, is Claudia
Larson's ribbed and massive magenta coat in Home for the Holidays. As Claudia (Holly Hunter) is quick to observe,
especially when cornered by an enminked high-school classmate from a lifetime ago, this isn't her enormous coat: "I,
of course, lost the stylish one that fits me in the airport." Upon arriving to her parents' crammed and gewgawed home for
an inevitably awkward Thanksgiving, Claudia is coerced into this mulberry nightmare by her huskily antic mother Adele (Anne
Bancroft), who foists it upon her before Claudia has even claimed her baggage. This means, yes, that Adele brought the coat
along before she could possibly know that her daughter needed one: an early sign that the impossible yet possible family in
Home for the Holidays is both perceptive and preposterous, knowingly and even uncannily predictive of each other's
needs and hurts even though they are unable to salve them, for themselves or for each other, which state of affairs the
film regards as merry, sad, and a little bit grotesque.
Home for the Holidays is a tottering but strangely durable object, just like the Larson family it chronicles. The
Time Out Film Guide dismisses Home as "a modest film (in every sense)," but I take exception on two grounds:
that the film's modesty is just as much a credit as a demerit, and that the structural detours, lopsided gags, and vastly
disparate tones in this film are often quite immodest. Nothing in the movie asks you not to notice these asymmetries, and
the resulting chaos of moods and performance styles illuminates something in the script, and in holiday rituals themselves,
and maybe even in middle-class American families, that a firmer directorial hand and a more balanced film would never be
able to access. So, skimming away the elements that plainly don't workSteve Guttenberg, the farting grandmother
(Geraldine Chaplin being less to blame than her silly part), the deliberate spilling of a stuffed turkey carcass over the
head of a fuming siblinga good deal of Home for the Holidays feels nervy, adventurous, and unapologetically
disillusioned.
The script, for one, is full of broken syntax, non sequiturs, lines that are interrupted or else just trail
off, and distended sentences that cry out for loopy, riffy enactment. Here is Bancroft's Adele admonishing her grown
daughter for abandoning her love of painting: "All I know is, whenever anybody comes in here, they make a beeline for your
brother Tommy's picture. 'Who did that?' they say. 'My oldest, my smartest daughter,' I answer, but she's busy squandering
her God-given talent filling in the holes in some dead people's pictures in Chicago, the Windy City." What makes the whole
line, the whole speech, is "the Windy City." Aside from the gratuitousness with which a mother reminds a daughter of her
own brother's name; from the rude way she actually reminds herself, mid-sentence, to name favorites among her brood;
from the implication throughout the movie that few (if any) outsiders ever do pass through this room; from the indictment
of the portrait itself, which bespeaks no talent whatever; from the bruising obliviousness with which Adele gets the nature
of Claudia's job totally wrong; there's the standing fact that Adele doesn't end her thought anywhere near where she began
it. In fact, she dead-ends herself in a little cul-de-sac of empty, accumulated knowledge.
The film teems with off-rhythms
like this: lighting and makeup are insistently unflattering, despite several scenes of dressing, bathing, and primping;
Claudia always loses the words of the songs she sings; the whole cast, stunningly well-matched for physical resemblance,
are vocally all over the place; speeches and toasts digress into outright opacity; everyone in the film drives poorly, and
too quickly. Like one of Adele's rattling speeches, the film doesn't end anywhere near where it began, charting an arc
from comically embittered candor to wild romantic mythmaking. But then, there are deep structural rhymes, too, as in the
twinned prologue and epilogue. At the outset, the hermetically closed serenity of a Renaissance painting that Claudia
restores in extreme close-up, breaking the whole of the artwork into isolated vignettes. At the end, more vignettes: a
montage of faux home-movies depicting islands of ecstatic happiness in the life of every character, though we have already
learned by now that the surrounding context for these moments is something less than happiness. Surely, we must apply
this pattern to the optimistic mirage of new love that almost concludes the movie. Of course, we hope we're wrong,
and I don't think the film faults us too heavily for hoping.
Home for the Holidays has a spirit and an ostensible shapelessness that are pure Cassavetes, enveloping a script that
only seems to reach for the precise calculations of 1930s screwball comedy. It's like a gene-splice of Cukor's Holiday
with Cassavetes' Love Streams, denying its own mise-en-scène either a veneer of reassuring beauty or the defensive affectation of obvious unbeauty.
Its director, notably, is one of our most controlled, businesslike, coolly mannered actresses, who had helmed only one movie
before this one and none since, but who is clearly jazzed by the vandalish act of producing an id-driven, deeply felt, but
sloppy-at-the-edges films; Home for the Holidays rewards all the impulses and admits all the angers that she tends to suppress as an actress,
despite her own frequent paeans to family devotions when speaking to the press. The whole film is an off-kilter prose poem of run-on sentences.
And sentence fragments. A raucous comedy tuned to the chords of middle-age, and thus closed off, almost by definition, to the typical (young, male) audience
for raucous comedy. A cast of top-flight actors, united only in having been so underutilized in bright but vaguely
disappointing careers, and pushed in this instance well away from their comfort zones. Note, though, that Foster's embrace
of cacophony at the level of acting, to include her heroic patience with Robert Downey Jr.'s exhilarating overplaying, has
been firmly prevented from afflicting either the soundtrack (prim, predictable, Polygram-stamped) or the stabilized color
palette (chestnut browns, burgundy, gold, black, and winter white, plus those offending yet scrupulously managed splashes
of hot pink). You can, if you want to, find some traces of Foster-ish control inside all the mayhem, which makes it both gratifying and deeply weird
when she lunges for stuffing-spilling sight-gags.
I know what you're thinking: much of the above reads like reasons to dislike the movie. My partner, aghast at this film's
inclusion on this list (and at such a high rung!) gently exhorted me to reiterate that this is a list of favorites, not a
list of "bests." Home for the Holidays is indeed a favorite, but also, for me, something of a best: a dramedy about
the funny-harsh messiness of families that truly doesn't blanch at being funny-harsh and messy. A middle-brow entertainment,
a holiday picture of all things, that preserves the spiky energies of a theatrical rehearsal, and one that radiates the dubious, even iconoclastic
instincts of a passive-aggressive analysand. And on the subject of cathartic honesty, this movie halts, three or four times, for moments of rare truth between
charactersthe final antipathy between two sisters, the gorgeous love between a sister and a brotherthat differ
entirely from almost anything the movies ever show us. As much as anything, these moments carry the rest of this shaggy-dog film to glory.
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