Foster’s Characters, Drama Too Cliche In ‘Holidays’
“Home for the Holidays” is the second film Jodie Foster has directed and, like her debut, “Little Man Tate,” it shows she has potential to make excellent movies.
But only potential, because while “Home for the Holidays” starts out with warmth and familial hilarity, it ends predictably with a sloshy display of sentiment.
Holly Hunter stars as Claudia, a single mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She gets fired, gets sick and gets a message from her teenage daughter (an under-utilized Claire Danes) that this is “the big weekend” for the daughter and her boyfriend. All this occurs on the same day she has to fly home to spend Thanksgiving with her family. She also loses her coat at the airport and sits next to an annoying lady on the plane.
But once she gets back to her hometown, things only get worse. Her well-meaning yet irritating mother (Anne Bancroft) loans her a huge, atrocious fuschia coat, while her well-meaning yet wacky father (Charles Durning) plays cheesy songs on his organ. Poor Claudia.
The movie gets an enormous shot in the arm when Claudia’s younger brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.) shows up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Tommy rockets through the movie with rapid-fire wisecracks flying from his lips and a Polaroid in his hand.
Though you can’t help but laugh at the interplay between the eccentric characters in this movie, it becomes apparent at Thanksgiving dinner that there are some deeply rooted resentments between Claudia, Tommy and their witchy sister, Joanne.
For me, this is where one of the biggest problems lies. “Home for the Holidays” is made up of quick, realistic dialogue, but some of the content gets lost in the shouting matches. It’s hard to understand exactly what happened between Tommy, Claudia and Joanne that was so terrible.
Unfortunately, when this movie digs below the surface, it loses its comedy and, therefore, its strength.
Jodie Foster’s direction was impressive in the beginning of the film. She pushed Robert Downey Jr.’s character to the very edge and still made him believable. In fact, all the characters came across like more extreme versions of people you might actually know. But when it comes to the serious scenes, the emotion they show isn’t moving or believable, because their feelings seem oddly cliched.
“Home for the Holidays” ends with a series of Technicolor scenes that are supposed to look like home movies. They whisper “seize the day, live the moment, for soon it will be gone.”
Though the sequence are beautiful and the message is true, how many times have we heard this before?
Grade: B
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ALTERNATE VIEW Our Generation movie reviewer Jeff Sackmann saw “Home for the Holidays” last weekend and came away with a different impression than Jessica Johnson. Here’s his view: The acting in this film is spectacular. The main appeal in “Holidays” is the way anyone can identify with some character - either as themselves or a particularly annoying relative. All the actors use this to great advantage. The plot, which could be described as “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” with a brain, is handled delicately. The opening and closing of this film are taken very seriously and are very touching. Grade: A