Hard to Watch

I have a Netflix subscription, so one day while looking at the offerings I decided that Home for the Holidays sounded like a fun comedy. Starring several people that I like to watch in movies (Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning), it sounded like it had a lot of potential. Further, the film is directed by Jodie Foster, who has achieved some sort of Hollywood sainthood with a string of excellent performances in films. However, after a fine start, Home for the Holidays spiraled into disappointment and stayed firmly there.

Claudia (Holly Hunter) loses her job, gets a bad cold and learns her teenage daughter is about to have sex for the first time, all on the day Claudia has to go to her parents' home for Thanksgiving. Claudia adores her idiot brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.), who is so annoying and anti-social that what you really want is for Claudia to take a baseball bat to Tommy's ego. The other relatives are what you might expect in a film about a dysfunctional family: The ditsy father who is mostly in another world, the chain-smoking alcoholic mother who knows what's best for everyone, the perfect and brittle sister with her boring banker husband, and the weird aunt who probably has a houseful of cats. There's one more guest at this particular party: A cute guy that Tommy brings, who is therefore presumably gay. You know that when the Thanksgiving meal starts, everything will go terribly awry. And it does.

Although the premise is good, the film is sunk by wildly annoying characters. Conversation is snotty and mean-spirited. Everybody talks at the same time and no one listens. Food flies through the air and lands in inappropriate places. It really did sound like a funny premise but watching it was just tedious, predictable and unpleasant. It's hard not to like Holly Hunter and her character is the most sympathetic of an unlovable lot. However, I just couldn't appreciate that she felt so much affection for Tommy, her sadistic, cruel and self-centered brother. (Tommy takes pictures of Claudia naked in the shower, he squeals his high-performance car up and down the street, he nearly rips Claudia's hand off by deliberately taunting her with the car, not to mention what he does/says to people he doesn't actually like.)

Making all this much worse was the fact that the dialog overlaps and is often impossible to understand. Normally I turn on captions when I watch a DVD but Home for the Holidays did not have English captions to help me out. It did have Spanish and French captions, though...

I rooted just a little for Claudia to get together with Leo (the handsome stranger) but it was hard to care by the end of this sloppy mess of a movie. Overall, it was tedious, boring and depressing, very depressing. My favorite scene was one where Claudia has an awkward conversation with a plumber (played by David Strathairn) who went to high school with Claudia. This scene was touching and wistful, and looked at the "what-might-have-beens" we all have in our lives. That was it for the good scenes, for me.

Responsible for the mess was Jodie Foster, who both produced and directed Home for the Holidays. Foster has an impressive resume but has been known to be in the occasional stinker, and this was obviously done during one of her off-days. Yeah, she has done some really good stuff and certainly deserved her Oscars. However, Home for the Holidays looks like a bad idea badly executed. For the life of me, I can't understand why so many people rave about this annoying and depressing movie. If you somehow enjoy watching people squirm in misery, then maybe this is the film for you.

Home for the Holidays is dark and depressing, there's no one to like and I found practically nothing to laugh at. Claudia (Holly Hunter's character) comes the closest to being likable but her affection for the ultra-annoying Tommy makes Claudia just another one of the idiots in this film. I recommend you avoid this movie.