Home for the Holidays Review

My latest Netflix rental was Home for the Holidays. Starring a lot of people I enjoy in movies (Holly Hunter, Robert Downey Jr., Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning), it sounded like an off-beat look at a dysfunctional family at the holidays. However, after a fine start, it spiraled into disappointment and stayed firmly there.

This film had a good start and decent-enough premise, but it's sunk by wildly annoying characters. Claudia (Holly Hunter) loses her job, gets a bad cold and learns her teenage daughter is about to have sex for the first time, all on the day Claudia has to go to her parents' home for Thanksgiving. Claudia adores her idiot brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.), who is so annoying and anti-social that you want to kill him. He badly needs a haircut, too. The other relatives come from central casting: The ditsy father who is mostly in another world, the chain-smoking alcoholic mother who knows what's best for everyone, the perfect and brittle sister with her boring banker husband, the weird aunt who probably has a houseful of cats, and the cute guy who may be gay.

Of course, once you get these people together, the expected happens. Conversation is snotty and mean-spirited. Everybody talks at the same time and no one listens. Food flies through the air and lands in inappropriate places. See, it sounds like a funny premise but it was just tedious, predictable and unpleasant. It's hard not to like Holly Hunter and her character is the most sympathetic of an unlovable lot. But even she can't rise above the affection she feels for Tommy, her sadistic, cruel and self-centered brother. Further, the dialog overlaps and is hard to understand, and the DVD did not have English captions to help me out. I rooted just a little for Claudia to get together with Leo (the handsome stranger) but it was hard to care by the end of this sloppy mess of a movie.

At the helm of the mess was Jodie Foster, who both produced and directed Home for the Holidays. Foster has an impressive resume but has been known to be in the occasional stinker. This was obviously done during one of her off-days.

Home for the Holidays is dark and depressing, and there's no one to like. Claudia (Holly Hunter's character) comes the closest to being likable but her affection for the ultra-annoying Tommy makes Claudia just another one of the idiots in this film. There are no laughs and little else to enjoy in this movie... avoid it.