Admittedly, I’m a sucker for the broken and I’m a sucker for the sheltered; the only way you could push the pre-empathy any further is if you made these poor saps fall in love as well. Tell me, who grabs your sympathy more – the “weird” kid who grew up in an enclosed box or the “normal” kid who has a replacement heart? It’s not a competition, thankfully. You get to root for them both in The House of Tomorrow.
I’m not sure how well-adjusted a kid with the name “Sebastian Prendergast” is gonna be no matter what he does. The details, however, only serve to exacerbate matters. Sebastian’s parents died when the kid was a kid, forcing Sebastian (Asa Butterfield) to be raised his nana Josephine (Ellen Burstyn), a one-woman cult. Together, the pair live in The House of Tomorrow, a geodesic dome model house designed by Josephine’s mentor, the late Buckminster Fuller.
Sebastian doesn’t get out much, or experience much, or live much. Nana keeps him on a strict diet of hippie sewage and anti-capitalist dogma. For a socialist, however, she sure doesn’t like to socialize. The House of Tomorrow’s one TV is constantly set to a Buckminster Fuller bio video. The only income these two receive is from tour groups curious as to how children of the 60s imagined the future. As the film opens, Josephine has a stroke while displaying their two-person commune to a local church youth group. The adult in charge of the group, Alan Whitcomb (Nick Offerman, quickly becoming one of my favorite on-screen parents), assumes control of the situation and unwittingly adopts the sheltered Sebastian in the process. Want some peer role models, Sebastian? Here’s my rebellious teen kids, Jared (Alex Wolff) and Meredith (Maude Apatow). The punk-loving, chain-smoking Jared is both candid and cynical about his replacement heart and his future.
The House of Tomorrow plays as a coming of age wake-up for a kid who never experiences life. How does one behave when the sum total of his role models, peers, mentors, and teachers 
boils down to one bat-shit crazy hippie? Movie fans like me might just give unintentional pause in seeing Sebastian deal with nana’s stroke: No, Asa, no! Don’t offer Ellen Burstyn drugs; haven’t you seen Requiem for a Dream? No, I suppose not. The House of Tomorrow only gets the television of the yesterday. The film soars when Josephine is out of the picture and we’re left with Sebastian and Jared both trying to figure out if they’re friends. Why not, fellas? Neither of you has got anybody else, and between Jared’s ultra-cynicism and Sebastian’s deer-in-the-headlights approach to life, it’s possible you two will average out to a couple of decent teens. Hey, viewers, you like punk music, right?
I am inclined to love this film, sure. In trying to separate my own passion for the subject matter with the presentation itself, I think The House of Tomorrow is still compelling. At its heart are two boys who look and think just like teenagers, yet would have to work up to the level of bullied at school. Would a bully want to pick on the kid who only talks about how sick his replacement heart medication makes him? How about the kid you never see? As an audience member, you don’t have to sympathize with the broken to appreciate two teens figuring out life, but it doesn’t hurt if you do.
♪Oh, give me a dome
Where the gawkers can roam
And the hippies recycle all day
Where seldom there’s glee
For you or for me
And we mock society anyway
Dome, dome near St. Paul
With a smug guaranteed to appall
Where two people plot
Their Gordian knot
And pretend that they’re having a ball♫
Not Rated, 85 Minutes
Director: Peter Livolsi
Writer: Peter Livolsi
Genre: Forming the band
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The sheltered
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Men without empathy
♪ Parody Inspired by “Home on the Range”
