Home for the Holidays: Feature Film, 1995
Directed by Jodi Foster
Starring: Holly Hunter, Robert Downey, Jr. , Claire Danes, Anne Bancroft, Dylan McDermott, Charles Durning, Cynthia Stevenson, Geraldine Chaplin
Screenwriter: W.D. Richter
Relationships Explored:
Relationships with siblings
Relationships with parents
Relationships with sons and/or daughters
Relationships with family members who have different sexual orientations
Relationships with one’s hometown
Relationships with the past and the present
Dear Cities of Light,
Do you have FOMO?
Fomo is “Fear of Missing Out.” It sounds like a backwards insult, doesn’t it? Like the opposite of Mofo or something. “Mofo” is an entirely different kind of acronym. We don’t have time to discuss that today. That one requires several centuries of unpacking.
Fomo, or “Fear of Missing Out” is a very 21st century thing. If we were living in the 1300s, we would have FOML, which is Fear of My Life, because people got the plague and there was very little dancing, and you could barely scrape food together to eat. Still, people believed in God and had babies. Weird, ay?
But here, in 2023, in this era of being, where my little film blog will wash away like a sand castle, I want you to remember something about FOMO. We all get out of ourselves sometimes and watch other people live and think, “Oh damn, I could have had the most amazing experience if I had just gone to that thing!” Or we try to do all the things to ensure we have checked all the boxes so that we can avoid fear! Only, what we don’t realize is that our fear that we missed out is fear itself! Trying to think of everything and have “all bases covered” is not necessarily conscientiousness. It is probably just thinly disguised fear! And if you act from peace and serenity, you just kind of do what you do and be how you be and life flows in an interesting way.
Take a breath now, you people in your cities (and towns, too, what the heck, join the fun) and say this with me: “I am a human being in the 21st century. I made a decision. Then I made another decision. I have made a series of decisions that have led me to this life I am leading.”
Yes! And!
“Each day is a new day. If I don’t like something about my decisions, I am the one in the position of authority to make a change.”
Ooh, you go girl.
When you recognize you are the captain of your own ship, the taxi driver of your own life, the director and conductor and all that, and you love yourself regardless of your foibles, because you are human and breathing—isn’t it grand?—then you can just relax a little bit. If you missed something you wanted to do—like an entire life that was made for you, but which you outsourced to others out of habit or misunderstanding or family conditioning—you can now make a new and better decision! You can now make a new and better life! It may be scary to try, but why not? Look at the reality: you are the one in charge.
I am telling you this because I love the film Home for the Holidays and it is a film everyone ought to see, and not just once, but several times. It is not like Elf, which is also pretty good and which you should see (especially with children). Home for the Holidays is focused mainly on family. It is about all of the above things I have just shared, about being the captain of your own ship even when there are storms and fog. And it is about a woman whose life has not gone the way she thought it would, and who is kind of unhappy. She is from Chicago. (Is anyone from Chicago happy? It is so cold there in the wintertime.)
This woman, Claudia (played by Holly Hunter) has a daughter who is about to have sex with her boyfriend, and all of life is going and going, and Claudia cannot keep up, and she does not know what is next. She lost her job. Her boss made out with her on the same day. Now she has to show up in Baltimore and spend several days with her parents, who treat her like a child, and her sister, who is uptight as a broomstick.
This film is one of the most beautiful and poignant and fun and easygoing and natural films you will ever see. It doesn’t end when it ends.
It is about love, and family. It is about loving people in your family even when they disappoint you and do not get you. It is also about magic, because it still exists. Magic comes through laughter, and sometimes through strangers with blue eyes.
It is about what kind of coat you wear, and how your coat causes people to make all kinds of assumptions about you.
It is about turkey sandwiches, and how good they are at 8 or 9 pm rather than at 3 pm when people eat Thanksgiving dinner.
It is about being a child, and a teenager, and a woman in one moment and every moment, and still trying to explain yourself or abandon yourself or just laugh.
It is about brothers who bring spark and light into your life, who annoy the hell out of you, but who have their own secrets and warmth they prefer to keep safe from your gaze.
And it has Anne Bancroft. Who wouldn’t watch a movie with Anne Bancroft? In this film, and in Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuaron, we get to watch the brilliance that is Anne Bancroft. Do you know, and remember, on sad days, that there is Anne Bancroft in this world? Dry your tears, child, and look out the window and breathe, and remember Anne Bancroft’s performances. Then you’ll feel some peace and passion about the gift of life.
I love the flashback scenes in Home for the Holidays. The father watching his daughter. His awe and humility about her fearlessness, and his gratitude that he is one of the two people who helped make her.
This film makes me cry in the best way, because mine are tears of truth. The truth of art when it holds something inside you that has gone beyond story and image, and becomes like a song that meets you at various times in life. This film, for me, landed years ago, unwittingly, in a space inside me that cannot be unmade.
I feel the love and the depth and the life paths of all these disparate people who are somehow related by blood, but who have so little in common with each other, and who are all living their lives separately, but trying to uphold this institution called “family” even when—very often—it makes no sense.
Please, Cities of Light, and the people inside the Cities, and anyone around twinkling lights this December, and anyone living under the stars, just sit down and watch this lovely movie. Do it sober. I don’t want anything to get in the way of how awake and fresh you are for the experience.
And let us not forget that beautiful, poignant movies are created with the foundation of excellent screenplays. Screenplays are how characters in a film come to be. It is these words on the page, this zing, that makes talented people believe and become and embody and be seen.
Namaste,
Ms. Wonderful
You can watch Home for the Holidays streaming on YouTube, Paramount Plus, & Amazon. Also, it was based on a short story by Chris Radant. Anyone know how to get that short story? I have always wanted to read it.