We all have different opinions about what is the ideal movie to watch over Thanksgiving. For some, they want a cheerful, sappy movie like The Family Stone that reminds them of the warm bonds of family. For others, they want to be taken away from reality with fantasy movies like any of the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movies.
For misanthropes like me, I prefer to watch a movie that reflects the messiness the holiday inevitably brings. When it was released in the fall of 1995, Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays didn’t cause much of a stir. Despite being directed by a two-time Oscar winner and starring Holly Hunter (who has just won an Oscar for 1993’s The Piano), Anne Bancroft (The Graduate‘s Mrs. Robinson), Claire Danes (hot off of My So-Called Life), and Robert Downey Jr. (the future Tony Stark), the movie flopped at the box office. Almost 30 years later, its cultural footprint is largely the same — non-existent.
But it’s a movie I always watch around this time because it reminds me of the family I escaped from and the one I still miss to this day. If that sounds contradictory, well, that’s the appeal of Home for the Holidays, a movie that nails the ambivalent feelings some of us have for returning home to feast on turkey and endure all the great and terrible things our families give us.
The humor is grounded in everyday observations
Most Thanksgiving comedies tend to be lightweight, but Home for the Holidays is different. From its opening scene, in which the heroine, Claudia (Hunter), gets fired from her job, awkwardly makes out with her boss, and finds out her teenage daughter (Danes) intends to lose her virginity while she travels back home, the movie conveys its brand of cringe, observational humor it will dole out over the course of its 103 minutes.
When Claudia reunites with her parents, the movie presents them as they are: loving, if slightly ridiculous, but never as caricatures. When Claudia’s mom, Adele (Bancroft, chain-smoking in an intentionally bad red wig), tugs at her hair and whispers to her in the car home from the airport, “I can see your roots,” it’s not intended to be mean; rather, it’s presented as both exasperating and loving. Claudia’s dad, Henry, is dotty, but not dumb, and as he randomly sweeps his wife in an impromptu dance set to Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual, Claudia looks on fondly at them, even if she’s a little nervous about being around them.
It gets sibling relationships right
Family members love each other, right? But that doesn’t mean we actually like our family members. Lord knows, I don’t … and that’s OK. Home for the Holidays is one of the few Thanksgiving movies that presents sibling relationships as they usually are: complicated, fraught, and not much fun. That’s certainly the case with Claudia’s relationship with Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson), her younger sister who is as different from her as possible. Whereas Claudia is a single mom who is artistic and, well, cool, Joanna is married (to Steven Guttenberg, no less), with two annoying children, and whose primary function is to be the perfect wife and mother.
She borders on caricature, but Foster is too intelligent of a director to let that slide. At one point near the end of the movie, Joanne confesses to Claudia, “If I just met you on the street, if you gave me your phone number, I’d throw it away.” That line is brutal, but it’s also honest, at least to me. Sometimes, our sisters and brothers can seem like strangers to us, even though we’re tied to them forever through random strands of DNA. And Joanne isn’t a bad person for saying this. The last we see of her, she’s enjoying the holiday with the family she made, one that provides the kind of love the family she was born into just can’t. That’s life.
It gave Robert Downey Jr. one of his best roles
In the mid-’90s, Robert Downey Jr.‘s career was in flux. The glow from earlier acclaimed movies like Less Than Zero and Chaplin was fading, and reports of the actor’s drug use were just starting to surface. Still, he was capable of giving dynamic, charismatic performances, and he gives Home for the Holidays an energy and depth that makes the movie richer and better.
Downey Jr.’s Tommy is the rebel of the family. He’s out and proud, which was still taboo in 1995 middle America, and he’s prone to making crude jokes and egging people on to confess what they really feel and think. We all know a Tommy, and we all secretly wish we were him, at least for an hour. And only an actor like RDJ can make a character like this endearing without being annoying.
In a weird way, it’s a sneak preview of his portrayal of Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. Both characters could be oft-putting and jerkish, but they work solely because Downey Jr. is playing them. They are still jerks, sure, but they are jerks with heart. You’d want Tommy on your side in an argument, which is important when you’re sitting at a dinner table on Thanksgiving.
It has a gut-punch of an ending
Home for the Holidays is filled with laughs big and small; I haven’t even mentioned Aunt Gladys (Geraldine Chaplin), who is prone to passing gas in the car and making passes at her sister’s husband. But the best part of the movie is its ending. No, that’s not shade. I promise! The movie finds a way to end gracefully without being pretentious about it.
Without spoiling the movie’s main plot, the last minutes of Home for the Holidays depict the happiest moments in each of the family member’s life. Some are in the distant past, as Gladys remembers a random encounter with Henry at a party, and some are more recent, as Tommy’s beachside wedding to his lover is shown. For Claudia, it’s in the present, in a moment she shares with someone that she’ll remember forever, even if it’s fleeting and somewhat inconsequential. That’s Home for the Holidays for me; a movie of no real importance that somehow faithfully represents some of life’s most important relationships.
Home for the Holidays is streaming for free on Pluto TV.
