Wanted: good home to loving film. Was found abandoned in theaters. Is friendly and well-meaning if a bit cliché and dull. Currently without audience or shelter from criticism. Answers to “Home Again,” isn’t that cute? Can be had for price of admission, OBO.
It’s sad when a film can’t find a home, isn’t it? And yet, I have no idea who Home Again is supposed to be for. Precocious 12-year-olds? Young filmmakers with mommy issues? The local chapter of Cougars Anonymous? Reese Witherspoon addicts? Movie addicts? Controlled substance addicts? Whom?
Daughter of a directing legend, Alice Kinney (Witherspoon) celebrates her 40th with a trial separation, wresting the kids from their NYC home and moving into her father’s Hollywood estate. Gee, most people just get drunk with friends at Chili’s. Oh yeah, she did that too. By playing her cards right, she ends up adopting three adult filmmaking children, Teddy (Nat Wolff), George (Jon Rudnitsky), and Harry (Pico Alexander). They all get to drinking and dancing and before you know it, Alice is mother of two girls and three twentysomethings. While it’s difficult for me to tell the boys apart, I believe Alice only ends up having a sexual relationship with one of them. I don’t really have a problem with this, except when one party is 40 and the other is 23 and you’re done “enjoying” one another, what do you talk about?
By the time the estranged spouse (Michael Sheen) wheedles his way into this crowded house, one can almost definitively say this is specific type of picture. O-ho! It’s the frustrated-trying-to-have-it-all genre, right? Alice has to juggle her crappy interior decorating career, two medium-sized children, her infatuation with the babysitters club, an ex-, a dating life, and possibly a drinking problem (the movie never says so, but the screenplay makes her bad-decision drunk at least twice in the span of a week) while trying to establish herself as woman. Roar!
Of course, if this were the case, the film would have centered a climax around her and not about her 12-year-old’s one-tweener-review of Camelot or whatever the Hell she did. Look, I am now officially tired of parental devotion tied to the attendance of a
single ball game, play, or open house. If your relationship with your child hinges entirely on your being present at exactly one event, you have already failed parenting. Do better. Subsequently, I am also now through with this particular cliché in movie form. Writers, find other ways to demonstrate multi-generational support.
As for Home Again, well, I’m left with the same question I started with: who is this picture for? I see it’s well-meaning, if poorly researched, but who cares? You have nothing to say and no audience in mind. Do we really want to see Reese play house with a kid born in 1994? Lemme ask this, do you want to see a screen relationship between, say, Ryan Reynolds and Miley Cyrus? What if there’s nothing else? What would make you attend that film? I don’t know about you, but I can’t go Home Again.
♪I’m lunchin’ at a taco station
Headed full-tilt towards inebriation
This college kid hittin’ on me highlights my mediocrity
At every mirth I disagree and wonder why you want to see
Home Again
Who titled this?
“Home Again”
Home I got kids awaiting
Home now three guys I’m dating
Home plots are so frustrating
When you don’t finish♫
Rated PG-13, 97 Minutes
Director: Hallie Meyers-Shyer (who doubles as a standardized personality test)
Writer: Hallie Meyers-Shyer
Genre: Movies without audiences
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The Reese Witherspoon obsessed. Do they exist?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Estranged husbands, I imagine
♪ Parody Inspired by “Homeward Bound”
