The Hell of Your Home

When you go home do you look around and wonder, ‘Who are these people, where did I even come from?’” Claudia Larson, as played by Holly Hunter, wonders. “I mean, you look at them all sitting there, you know… they look familiar, but who the hell are they?”

What could be more familiar, and familial, a sentiment? 1995’s “Home for The Holidays,” the sophomore directorial effort from former child actress Jodie Foster, serves mashed potato, creamed corn slop and the slush of November’s dying color-grade — dingy grays, dreary maroons, stale coffee browns. Set in a suburb of Baltimore, single mother Claudia returns to her parents’ house for Thanksgiving after losing her job (and losing her teenage daughter to her boyfriend’s family). The film is turgid and nostalgic, capturing a particularly cozy American ugliness.

Foster, who directed and re-wrote the original screenplay, seems to fracture her psyche between her characters, splitting her concerns. There’s the wry, straight-shooting, but put-upon workhorse Claudia, and there’s her brother Tommy, played with a dashing freneticism by a young, and still heroin-addicted, Robert Downey Jr. (Downey has spoken publicly on the subject). With the shadow of the AIDS crisis still looming in America, Foster wrote and directed Tommy with a scandalizing sense of freedom, as a young man, it turns out, with little emotional need for his family. He’s already secretly married his boyfriend, surrounded by their friends, in a far off world he’s crafted for himself, that the limited scope of his family (or Foster’s public at the time) could never understand.

Screening presented by The Boondocks Film Society at The Moviehouse in Millerton, N.Y. on Dec. 13.

Robert Downey Jr. in “Home For the Holidays”. Photo courtesy of MovieStillsDB

Robert Downey Jr. in “Home For the Holidays”. Photo courtesy of MovieStillsDB

Robert Downey Jr. in “Home For the Holidays”. Photo courtesy of MovieStillsDB