The Gobble Project: Home for the Holidays

 

I always found those movies about some guy or gal who had moved far away from home and due to circumstances, whether they be as dark as a funeral, or as typically mundane as the Holidays, comes home.  Good examples:  Beautiful Girls with a lived-in Timothy Hutton, This is Where I Leave You which has slick plot devices and a great cast with Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, and a hilarious Adam Driver.  There's a bunch. 

I've been that person. It's amazing what "home" looks like when you've been away from it forever, from the town you lived in itself, to the places where your parents and siblings now reside.  There's a whole bushel of mental and emotional avalanche that comes with your "return".

For Thanksgiving, there's Home for the Holidays. This dances a fine line.  Holly Hunter and her brother, Robert Downey Jr. are the ones coming home. So, they're kind of alternative rock actors in the first place.  

Well, Downey WAS.

But when these kids come home, there's some deeply buried disdain within the love of this clan.  There's a curiously senile member of the family with a bit of a secret.  Sisters so tightly wound they're gonna snap, at any given moment.  There's poor Charles Durning, who just wants some peace for God's sake, and a transcendent Anne Bancroft trying to hold it all together. 

Every person here is carrying some sort of shit around, but none more than Holly Hunter.  She just lost her job, and her teen daughter has decided making the trip home from Chicago to Baltimore with Mom on Thanksgiving just isn't the shit.  Downey's gay "I don't really give a shit who I offend" brother serves as a buffer for Hunter, but only to a slim degree.  She's got edges of her own to flash.

This may be the angriest holiday film I've ever seen with the exception of Ted Demme's The Ref.  No one is swinging axes, mind you, but there's some sharp dialogue bandied about with barbed edges.  But at the end, family is family, and if one member has to force all these motherfuckers to sit down and be schooled on that fact?

Well, so be it. 

That said, this movie may not be for everyone, but Home for the Holidays has a hell of a lot going for it besides just that terrific cast.  It's underrated, and I think folks ought to take another look at it. 

Maybe this year.