"Home For the Holidays" A film review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM (88.5), Tampa, FL November 4, 1995 Thanksgiving is just three weeks away. If your Thanksgiving holiday is going to be spent at a big family gathering, my suggestion to you is that you go out and see "Home for the Holidays" immediately. I figure it will serve as a kind of innoculation. After seeing this film nothing awful that happens around your Thanksgiving table is likely to be as bad as the things that happened on Claudia Larson's Thanksgiving visit home. Given the tensions in her family, yours and mine may look downright benign by comparison. If she can come away from her visit in a forgiving and hopeful frame of mind, maybe we can too. In Jodie Foster's second outing as a director (her first was "Little Man Tate"), she has selected an over-the top domestic comedy in which the characters are just slightly exaggerated but they're not so far removed from reality that we can't recognize them as people we might know or possibly even be related to. She has gathered an expert if sometimes surprising cast to play the family in question. Holly Hunter is the film's central character, Claudia, an art restoration specialist in a Chicago museum who loses her job as the film opens. She has a teenage daughter (Clare Danes) who declines to accompany her mother on the trip to Baltimore for Thanksgiving because, as she tells her mother as she drops her off at the airport, she's planning to lose her virginity over Thanksgiving. During the plane ride Claudia's feeling fragile enough to call her brother Tommy to ask for his help getting through this awful time. Claudia's parents (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning) meet her at the airport and immediately begin treating her as though she were a child coming home from summer camp rather than as an adult woman. She has to fight the urge to instantly revert to her childhood behaviors, as well. Pretty soon her gay brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.) and a friend of his arrives even though he hadn't been expected to come. Tommy either succumbs instantly to the time warp (or never did grow up, it's not clear which) so he acts like a manic adolescent almost the whole time he's there--sometimes it's charming and other times you'd like to wring his neck. Add to the mix spinsterish, love-starved, tippling Aunt Glady (played, astonishingly and very funnily, by Geraldine Chaplin), and a homophobic, meanspirited, perfectionist sister (Cynthia Stevenson) with her equally homophobic if ineffectual cipher of a husband (Steve Guttenberg) and their spoiled bratty kids and you have the makings of a Thanksgiving dinner from hell. Jodie Foster has managed to keep this whole feast of a farce moving along at a rapid clip. The dialogue is wicked and there's so much of it going on at the same time (as is the case at family gatherings) that you'll surely have to go back and see it a second time to begin to catch it all. Wine is drunk, secrets are revealed, misunderstandings arise and are cleared up, old wounds and new grievances are aired, jealousies and resentments flare. And yet, through it all, astonishingly, there is an underlying sense of connection of belonging together among even the most hostile of the characters. Nobody walks out. And, among some of the characters, there is a real sense of affection and love. I happened to catch an interview with Jodie Foster on television the other day and she said that she was trying to make a film about forgiveness--in some cases forgiveness tinged with bitterness, to be sure because there is no one who knows where to stick in the knife to best effect better than the people who've known you all your life. And so, despite the horrible things that people say and do to one another in this film, in the end what Foster focuses on is our ability to think of them in the best possible light remembering them at their best instead of at their worst and hoping that they are able to be or to become their best selves. Possibly seeing this film will help some people to do that. So the reasons to see "Home for the Holidays" are: It's a cornucopia of good performances by a superb acting ensemble, guided with great skill by Jodie Foster's directorial hand; it has a well-written screenplay with very funny dialogue that hits home a lot of the time; seeing this dysfunctional family will make yours seem better by comparison; it will put you perhaps in a good frame of mind for tolerating and even enjoying your own holiday family gathering; on top of all this, its a great gay-friendly film that deals openly with the issue of homophobia and strikes a hefty blow against it. For the WMNF Women's Show this has been Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1995 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.