If You Dare, Go Home For The Holidays!

There are three kinds of people in the world: those who only enjoy journey’s end (or imagining it), those who only enjoy the journey, and those who have no preference, which could be a positive or negative thing. If you’re going to enjoy 1995’s Home For The Holidays, directed ever so cannily by Jodie Foster, then you should be the second type. There is no ending to it, but another up-in-the-air journey for our thirtyish heroine in rediscovering the fearlessness that she possessed as a child. I’m of the second type and find this an asset to the movie.

I’ve read a slew of professional and unprofessional reviews, but surprisingly have found none that really understand the point of this PG-13 movie like Foster does, as shown by her lucid commentary on the DVD, and I think I do.

That observation above was something that just came to me while trying to figure out why Home For The Holidays wasn’t that well received by audiences in 1995 while the majority of comments on imdb.com praise the movie as an annual Thanksgiving favorite and Roger Ebert actually loved it and wrote one of the few reviews I completely agree with.

Holly Hunter plays our bewildered, distraught heroine who is trying to hold it all together for Thanksgiving with her wildly dysfunctional family. Before flying to her parents’ home (Baltimore or Boston?), she gets fired from her art museum job as painting restorer, smooches with her ex-boss by accident, is told by her sixteen-year-old daughter (Claire Danes) that she may have safe sex for the first time with her boyfriend where she is spending Thanksgiving, and she suffers a friggin’ cold.

Reality continues on the flight when her neighbor from hell won’t shut up except when Holly’s character, Claudia, makes a frantic call to her brother Tommy’s answering machine and pleads with him to come so she won’t be alone. Luckily he hears the message, grabs a friend and a camera, and surprises her and the family late that night.

It’s Robert Downey, Jr. and Dylan McDermott to the rescue!

Now this isn’t a movie that focuses on the brother’s gayness or the flowering of romance between Claudia and Tommy’s hubba-hubba friend who she assumes for half of the movie is also gay. Just so you don't forget. It’s about journeys...from Claudia’s point of view.

Instead of cliched, dysfunctional characters, we have real, flesh and blood people who show many of us ourselves and this may not set well with some people. Foster commented on the DVD that people 23 and under would probably enjoy Home For The Holidays most, although she naturally loves it, is proud of it and wouldn’t change anything about it. I think it goes back to what type you are as specified above.

Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning gorgeously play the goofy, loving parents their kids are frustrated with or embarrassed by, but who also show their underlying affection for their aging parents (which Claudia doesn’t want to realize, but is forced to). The dynamics between them all, I contend, are typical of families and filled with palpable emotion.

Joanne: You're calling me a freak?
Tommy: No, I'm calling you a product of baboon lovin'. There's a distinction.

A younger sister arrives with her grumpy husband and flighty children, played by Cynthia Stevenson and Steve Guttenberg, and no one likes them much. This sister, Joanne, is especially not liked by Tommy as the quote indicates and he hilariously makes a real turkey of her as well (you’ll have to see it)!

Tommy: Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird!

It’s true that Robert Downey, Jr. used drugs while making the movie (Foster doesn’t mention it in her commentary, but she tried to help him stop). You may disapprove of his habit and maybe find him too over-the-top, but his adlibbing and originality throughout is bitingly brilliant. He never rehearsed a scene the same way twice and I can easily understand how frustrating he was to work with.

Adele (the mother): I'm giving thanks that we don't have to go through this for another year. Except we do, because those bastards went and put Christmas right in the middle, just to punish us.

This is no Hallmark, feel-good movie. At best you will feel mixed emotions watching this that reflects the characters’ emotions. Its tagline is: on the fourth Thursday of November, 84 million American families will gather together…and wonder why. Don’t rent this if all you’ve experienced is Norman Rockwell. "Evil Ways" written by Santana and performed by Rusted Root lead us twistedly into the movie; Janis Joplin's "Piece of my Heart" slides us out.

Claudia: Nobody means what they say on Thanksgiving, Mom. You know that. That's what the day's supposed to be all about, right? Torture.

However, the trip home isn’t all torture for Claudia or any of them outside of Joanne and her husband. I think they only came because it was the right thing to do and Joanne wanted to be the perfect daughter or something. Claudia bonds with the obnoxious Tommy to try to distance herself from her bizarre family (don’t forget deranged spinster Aunt Glady who has the hots for Claudia’s father and wears a Fruit Loops necklace, played spacily by Geraldine Chaplin ), then smooths over hurt feelings, but her parents do love her and accept her as they do Tommy.

I don’t think it’ll be torture for you either. The acting didn’t look like acting and the mostly quick-paced story continued to surprise me. It made me smile and laugh too. The growing chaos with the arrival of company, related in titled chapters, was well caught and satirized by Foster and scriptwriter W.D. Richter from a short story by Chris Radant.

Life is a journey to enjoy and learn from now. Be present to life and try to be fearless. If you remember that and that you need your family to help you on your journey, you’ll love Home For The Holidays too!