Home for the Holidays
A yummy Thanksgiving Movie Treat for you to enjoy this holiday!
Jodie Foster's finest directorial effort remains in this 1995 comedy about the Thanksgiving get-together of Holly Hunter's thoroughly dysfunctional clan, which includes her mother (Anne Bancroft), father (Charles Durning), brother (Robert Downey Jr.), and his friend (Dylan McDermott). What ensues is the gold-standard for family-gathering holiday films, full of absurdity, pathos, and, ultimately, a rousing sense of the ups and downs of dealing with relatives.
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Forty-year-old single Chicagoan Claudia Larson gets a lot of bad news just before Thanksgiving, putting her in an even worse mood in preparation for her visit with her family in Baltimore at the home of her overbearing parents, Henry and Adele Larson. Others coming for Thanksgiving dinner are Adele's crazy sister, Glady, Claudia's humorless sister, Joanne Wedman, and her equally humorless family. Joanne acts as the primary care-giver for their parents. Unexpected arrivals — Claudia's younger and mischievous gay brother, Tommy Larson, and his new boyfriend, Leo Fish, and Russell Terziak, Claudia's sad old "friend" who Adele is trying to reintroduce to Claudia. Beyond the disasters and potential disasters Claudia is anticipating as well as the unexpected ones that do ultimately occur at dinner, Claudia is most concerned about what happened between Tommy and his long-term boyfriend, Jack Gordon. She is also concerned about what her own teen-aged daughter, Kitt, is doing at home without her.
*Movie information in Story Line, Details and Cast sections from IMDb and/or Amazon Movies.
Genres: Drama, Romance, Comedy
Release Date: November 3, 1995
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Rating: PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
Director: Jodie Foster
Studio: Paramount
Review:
"Underrated, underviewed." 28 October 2004 | by treedcub (New York) –
People either love or hate this film. It seems to me that, for those who hate it, there is too much going on in the scenes. The dialogue is often open ended, and the action is at times frenetic so that the viewer isn't sure where he/she should be focusing attention. That, I submit, is the true beauty of this unusual movie. It has an over the top realism that makes it a rewarding film to watch multiple times. There are so many layers in the dialogue and the acting, so many subtleties between characters, that you can watch it many times and still be noticing something new. This may be billed a comedy, but it is filled with heartbreak and tragedy, betrayal and disappointments. This is not a run of the mill feel good holiday movie. I think those who rate this movie poorly, in some way, miss that. I hope Jodie Foster directs again. She's immensely gifted.
Starring:
Holly Hunter, Robert Downey, Jr., Anne Bancroft
Supporting Actors:
Charles Durning, Dylan McDermott, Geraldine Chaplin, Steve Guttenberg, Cynthia Stevenson, Claire Danes, Emily Ann Lloyd, Zack Duhame, Austin Pendleton, David Strathairn, Amy Yasbeck, James Lecesne, Angela Paton, Randy Stone, Sam Slovick, Susan Lyall, Shawn Hatosy