30 Movies to Get You Through the Holidays

The movie is not a comedy, but it contains big laughs, and it is not a tragedy, although it could be if we thought about it long enough. It suggests that modern big-city lives are so busy, so distracted, so filled with ambition and complication that there isn’t time to stop and absorb the meaning of things. Neither tragedy nor comedy can find a place to stand; there are too many other guests at the party.

And yet, on reflection, there is a tragedy buried in Hannah and Her Sisters, and that is the fact of Mickey’s status as the perennial outsider. The others get on with their lives, but Mickey is stuck with his complaints. Not only is he certain there is no afterlife, he is very afraid that this life might also be a sham. How he ever married Hannah in the first place is a mystery; it must have been an intermediate step on his journey to his true role in life, as the ex-husband and hanger-on.

There is a scene in the movie where Michael Caine confronts Barbara Hershey and tells her that he loves her. She is stunned, does not know what to say, but does not categorically deny that she has feelings for him. After she leaves him, he stands alone on the street, ecstatic, his face glowing, saying “I’ve got my answer! I’ve got my answer!”

Underlying all of Hannah and Her Sisters is the envy of Mickey (and Woody) that anyone could actually be happy enough and lucky enough to make such a statement. And yet, by the end of the movie, in his own way, Mickey has his answer, too.

Home for the Holidays ½

PG-13, 104 m., 1995

Holly Hunter (Claudia Larson), Robert Downey Jr. (Tommy Larson), Anne Bancroft (Adele Larson), Dylan McDermott (Leo Fish), Charles Durning (Henry Larson), Geraldine Chaplin (Aunt Glady). Directed By Jodie Foster. Written By W. D. Richter. Based on a short story by Chris Randant.

There is a point in Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays when a brother and his brother-in-law are fighting on the front lawn while the father tries to break it up by wetting them down with a garden hose. Looking across the street at the neighbors gawking, the father snarls, “Go back to your own goddamn holidays!”

The movie, which is about the Thanksgiving family reunion from hell, is not exactly a comedy and yet not a drama, either. Like many family reunions, it has a little of both elements, and the strong sense that madness is being held just out of sight. Have we not all, on our ways to family gatherings, parked the car a block away, taken several deep breaths, rubbed our eyes and massaged our temples, and driven on, gritting our teeth? That is not because we do not love our families, but because we know them so very, very well.

We get that sense in the opening scenes of Home for the Holidays, as Claudia Larson (Holly Hunter) discovers she has been fired from her job at a Chicago art museum, and responds by kissing her boss; she’s already building up holiday hysteria. Claudia is driven to the airport by her teenage daughter Kitt (Claire Danes), who confides she will “probably” experience sex for the first time over the weekend. At the other end, she’s greeted by her parents, Adele and Henry (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning). Henry’s taking a home video. Adele has brought along an extra parka in case Claudia has lost hers (she has).

The Larson family home is a triumph of art direction. It has been furnished with dozens if not thousands of the sorts of objects found in mail-order gift catalogs. Not expensive catalogs, but the kinds of catalogs with sixteen gifts on each page, each one a “miniature” of something you would not possibly want the full-size version of, such as a reindeer or a barbershop quartet.

Henry is a retired airport maintenance man. Adele chain-smokes all the time and can read her daughter-s mind. (“Mom, I’m thinking of a change . . . I may not be at the museum all that much longer.” “They fired you!”) Soon Claudia’s gay brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.) turns up with a new friend named Leo Fish (Dylan McDermott). The parents seem to accept their son’s homosexuality without acknowledging it, which is an accurate note for many families. Claudia is disturbed by the absence of Tommy’s former boyfriend, who was popular with the entire family.

Then Claudia’s sister Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson) and brother—in—law Walter (Steve Guttenberg) turn up. Walter cannot stand Tommy. Tommy cannot stand Walter or Joanne, and finds a way to deposit a turkey in her lap without quite seeming as if he meant to.

These are all routine family problems compared with the arrival of Aunt Glady (Geraldine Chaplin), who is quite mad in her own style of passionate intensity, and has had a crush on Henry since she first laid eyes on him (he looked, she recalls, like a horse in a uniform).