Home for the Holidays

reviewed Thu, 20 Nov 2003

I liked this movie even more than I remembered enjoying it when it first came out. They showed it as part of a classic film series at the Loews Georgetown theater, and I was the only person in the auditorium. Which was a good thing, because this theater was basically just the front part of a regular theater (they used what would have been the rest of the theater to put in another concession stand that I’ve never seen being used): it had five or six rows of seats on the floor, and then two rows of stadium seating. Even in the back row, I felt uncomfortably close to the screen.

Home for the Holidays perfectly captures the ambivalence of adult children going home (for Thanksgiving, in this case): you love your family, but they drive you nuts; you try to all get along because it’s the holidays, but because it’s the holidays, everyone’s keyed up and stressed out. Holly Hunter gets a little too cutesy at times, but Robert Downey, Jr., as her gay brother, Cynthia Stevenson as her perfectionist sister, and Anne Bancroft as her mother make up for it. I laughed, I cried, I recommend this as a must-see, treacle-free holiday film (and I’ll put in another plug for The Ref while I’m at it as another one).

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