“Well that was absurd. Let’s eat dead bird”

As a British man, I have a very limited experience of Thanksgiving beyond the world of film. I was fortunate enough to spend a truly wonderful day with an American family last year, joining their meal, during my time studying abroad in Philadelphia. But all the same, the images of Turkey and the joy of family gatherings come from Planes, Trains and Automobiles (a film I have written about multiple times on this blog) and my historical knowledge of the events surrounding the holiday stem more from Addams Family Values than historical texts. This November however I was introduced to another thanksgiving filmic delight by a dear friend of dual citizenship with Britain and America, who has naturally spent many Thanksgivings with her family and often touts the film as one of the most realistic depictions of her family life that she has ever seen. But upon watching it myself I found that this went beyond her experience and that the film was one that sits so perfectly in a world of realism that it’s humour and heart becomes almost boundless. The film is the 1995 comic drama Home for the Holidays.

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The second of four films directed by multiple academy award winning actress Jodie Foster, the film follows a thanksgiving weekend with the Larson family, told primarily through the perspective of Holly Hunter’s Claudia, who has just recently lost her job, made out with her boss and learned of her daughters plans to lose her virginity over the weekend as she spends it with her boyfriend rather than with her mother away from Chicago. Of Foster’s four directorial efforts, this is definitely the best of them. With Little Man Tate being a perfectly fine melodrama, The Beaver being a painfully bizarre misfire and Money Monster being a pretty serviceable thriller. I’d say that Home for the Holidays is certainly the most successful of the four and shows an array of talents clearly in Foster’s arsenal, one that I unfortunately don’t feel has been tapped too much in the intervening years in her work as a director. It’s hard to say with a sample of just four films, but I feel that the main issue with her later films is the lack of simplicity in concept, or rather the lack of capability in delivering such a high concept script. Whereas this film strives in its borderline improvisational flare for building wholly realistic set pieces and overflows with touching quieter moments between characters that have had such great life breathed into them that it is enough to bring a tear to ones eye.  The film comes from a script by W.D Richter, based off a short story by a Chris Radant, and is radiant with home truths and blissfully funny family interactions that all seem all too familiar. In many ways the film’s best aspect is its script; however, the script only works as well as it does, due to the absolutely stellar to no end ensemble cast.

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At the head of the family are Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning, as Adele and Henry Larson, the dearly loving couple that are the matriarch and patriarch of this family. Bancroft solidifies herself as one the great movie smokers and brings all of the warmth that she can to the character, facets of her performances that people overlook with the obstruction of the cold and iconic Mrs Robinson role that she portrayed so pitch perfectly. But her Adele here is more akin to her work in The Miracle Worker or The elephant man, with an obviously heightened comedic edge. Durning offers similar warmth to his character, tapping a vein that gave him great success in Tootsie, here he plays a similar role to similar immense success. Durning is relatively quiet in comparison to Bancroft and other characters, but his presence of comfort is always felt and gives the film a familiar tone that is blissfully heart-warming. As well as in both Durning and Bancroft’s cases offering great humour in addition. Dylan McDermott is marvellous and very charismatic as Hunter’s love interest, brought along as an offering to his sister, from the true star of the film; Robert Downey Jr. as the fabulously raucous and witty hell raising brother Tommy. Downey steals absolutely every scene he is in and never make a single entrance or exit without a wonderfully dishy comment to deliver. However, as with all the cast, Downey also has great pathos in certain moments, managing to illuminate the struggle he has faced as a gay man in a relatively suburban and un-accepting neighbourhood with a few single looks and glares. Much of the second acts conflict comes from Downey’s relationship with his other sister Joanne, played with similar greatness by Cynthia Stevenson, and his brother in law and Joanne’s husband, played with a manic touch by Steve Guttenberg. Claire Danes appears in a brief opening and in one later scene as Hunter’s daughter, and is perfectly fine as Danes usually is, but doesn’t really bring much else to the role. The final piece of the puzzle is Geraldine Chaplin as Aunt Glady. Reuniting with the man who played her father in Chaplin, where she played her own grandmother, confusing I know. For me however this is the weakest aspect of the film, with Chaplin being given a kooky and borderline crazy character that really for me feels out of place with the realism of the rest of the film. But Chaplin still brings humanity to the role and a lot of humour and ultimately leads to the character not completely breaking the film. The stellar ensemble really is the film’s best aspect. Hell, there’s even a one scene The Firm reunion with Hunter sharing a scene with David Strathairin once more, in a very funny exchange with a more broader touch of comedy than in the majority of the film, that still works especially well here.

The film does have its touch of dated moments, primarily a painfully long extended opening credits sequence of Hunter’s character restoring an oil painting, which ironically feels like you’re watching paint dry. But all in all, the film has aged remarkably well and it takes a moment for one to contextualise how radical the depiction of such normalisation of Downey Jr’s character's homosexuality must have been in 1995, when it obviously doesn’t faze us in the slightest today. It’s actually so refreshing that there isn’t an extended sub-plot where Durning’s father must learn to accept his son’s true nature. Instead we have a few light jokes and a truly beautiful small moment between the two of them following Durning talking to Downey’s partner over the phone. This really is where the film’s biggest strengths lie, with these beautiful smaller moments constantly subverting our expectations for a huge blow-out argument scene. Instead we are constantly driven instead toward brief and sparse minute long interactions that perfectly encapsulate the relationships usually in under 60 seconds. Foster and Richter simply do an awful lot with very little. In many ways with its style the film emulates Woody Allen, with whom Foster worked with just four years earlier as an actress in Shadows and Fog. The clearest influence here is Allen’s seminal masterpiece Hannah and Her Sisters, with its holiday settings, title cards and focus on the micro and the macro of family relations. It’s extended dialogue scenes are very reminiscent of Allen and in certain moments hold almost all of the humour and drama that his best scripts have done so often.

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All in all the film is a serious joy to watch, with plenty of more serious moments to pair with the very human, realistic and hilarious rapport shared by the family. Hunter takes us into this world and holds the story together with the same deftness that she displayed facing the same task of being a centre to multiple different storylines with her astounding work in Broadcast News. In a not intentionally negative light I will comment that this film isn’t the best work of anybody involved, not Hunter, not Foster, not Downey, not During, nor Dylan or even Danes, and definitely not Bancroft. But is in the accumulation of such a stellar cast delivering such a warm and truthful piece of writing, through the lens of a director focussed on ensemble, that ultimately leads to a film that delighted me wholeheartedly and I’m sure will have a similar effect upon yourselves. By the time the final montage rolls, accompanied by Nat King Cole’s incredible voice, you simply can’t help but feel nostalgic and long for the next time you and your family, or anybody who you love and hold dear, are together again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-          - Thomas Carruthers