BEFORE: OK, I realize I'm a little late, because I watched this one in the evening of Thanksgiving itself, and I meant to knock it out the day before. Things happened, it rained, I fell asleep, I had to work an extra shift. Does it really matter? I got to it just under the wire, and it counts. Anyway, this whole week in movies has been about the holidays and getting together with family, and then the struggles involved with putting up with that. The holiday repercussions, let's say. Dealing with your parents, or if you're older, dealing with your children. Dealing with your siblings, that's a big challenge, too. You could just spend the holiday alone, but then what's the fun in that? You'll probably end up depressed that way.
We had a relatively stress-free holiday - no family but us, no being forced to watch the damn parade, no struggle to get a turkey cooked. We drove out to a mansion on Long Island which is now a hotel, as we found out about a month ago that they serve up a Thanksgiving buffet. A little pricey maybe, but if we had gone to a restaurant with my parents it would have been about the same for four people to eat a mediocre meal, so why not spend the same amount for two people to have a spectacular meal? We're coming off of three years where we had to drive up to Massachusetts, buy a boxed turkey dinner from a grocery store that we pre-ordered, and then find a way to heat that up and deliver it to my parents at their assisted living complex. Well, my parents have moved to North Carolina to live with my sister, so we had free rein to have whatever meal that we wanted to have.
And what a meal it was - salad bar, cold seafood bar (shrimp, clams & oysters), then a pasta station with eggplant florentine, also pasta in vodka sauce mixed in a giant wheel of parmesan (not my thing, but my wife likes parmesan, so she was all into that.). Then a carving station with ham and shell steak, a fall station with turkey (white or dark, your choice), and stuffing, and a mashed potato bar with all the toppings you could want (bacon, sour cream, chives, mushrooms, etc.). Everything was so elegant that I was surprised there wasn't a gravy fountain. Then a large selection of desserts, on a big table that had its own ROOM. Yeah. Apple pie, pumpkin pie, chocolate mousse cake, tiramisu cake, and more. I certainly ate until I could not eat any more, and the bonus was that we had a lunch seating instead of a dinner seating, so we were driving back home past all the traffic with people going out to Long Island for dinner with family. We had the rest of the day to relax and recover and do nothing, I took a nap and then called my parents, so family obligation done with minimal stress, and no arguments. That's a Thanksgiving win...
Julianne Moore carries over from "The Ladies Man".
THE PLOT: A few days spent in close proximity to each other around Thanksgiving soon leads to secrets and old resentments being revealed, which threaten to splinter an already dysfunctional family.
AFTER: Ah, the complexities of going back home to visit your parents for the holidays. You're reminded of a time when your parents were your world, they provided for you and took care of you, and taught you how to live, and then you went out into the world and started making your own decisions and maybe realized there was a different way to live. Maybe you figured out at some point that your parents didn't know everything after all, or were too rigid in their thinking about religion or relationships or whatnot, and you couldn't wait to get out of there and take control. And then when you come back after some time away you're maybe looking at them very differently, you can see through the cracks and see that they are imperfect people (as you also are) and they're messed up in their own way (as you also are).
The film starts with the four children returning home - two are bringing their spouses/partners with them, and those couples both manage to have sex on the trip, one on the train and the other during a car stop. This makes sense, because they're about to spend a few days at their parents house, and who wants to have sex there? I'm reminded of the old George Carlin quip about how nobody gets laid on Thanksgiving, it's just not a sexy holiday. Plus all the coats are on the bed when guests come over. He had a point - but then on the first night home, both couples have sex AGAIN, and that doesn't make sense at all. Didn't they just DO that on the trip over? Neither couple is married but they're allowed to sleep in the same beds, and for some reason, the parents are OK with that. They must not have very many guest rooms, or else the parents are pretty progressive.
Warren hasn't been home for three years, not since breaking up with his girlfriend, Daphne. He arrives a day early, which bothers his father for some reason, there go all his hopes about maybe refinishing the dining room table. Wait, what? But there's more to this story, because Warren learns that Daphne is back in town, too - and they get together and discuss maybe giving things another go. But Daphne reveals that Warren's father once kissed her, and well, that's a family no-no, making a pass at your son's girlfriend. We start to get clues that maybe Dad didn't know what he was doing, so it's possible he has dementia, but still, that's no excuse. Dad also goes out to shoot a wild turkey for Thanksgiving, but who the hell did that in 1997? Is that a Maine thing, or do some people just like to hunt their own food? We have supermarkets now, there's no need to do that. Anyway, he apparently fails to find a wild turkey so he buys one from the store and then shoots it so his family will think that he's still a good hunter. Umm, sure, but then who plucked it and butchered it? There's got to be a NITPICK POINT here somewhere.
Meanwhile, older daughter Mia starts questioning her relationship when she goes into town to find a bookstore (Dad apparently used the last chapter of a book for kindling) and bumps into a man who recognizes her from kindergarten. Cezanne (not his real name, he changed it) had a crush on her then, and somehow 30 years later he still has feelings for her AND he's a nice guy AND he somehow knows the ending to that book, so there's some potential there, enough for Mia to spend a few afternoons with him and thus also avoid the family touch football game.
Also meanwhile, the family celebrates Thanksgiving, but the rest of the characters are quite maddeningly not very fleshed out, or really given much to do, for that matter. What's the deal with the youngest daughter, Leigh, who still lives at home? What about Jake and Margaret, the film kind of forgets about them after a while, also. In order to be a true ensemble piece, all of the characters need to be developed, and if not, then why are they even there? The family dynamic wouldn't have been that much different with, say, three siblings instead of four, so if you're going to have four, why not give all of them a decent storyline, instead of just half of them?
Maybe there's a reason why this film isn't streaming anywhere at the moment - which I thought was a bit odd, I mean, I've HEARD of the film, why isn't it on Netflix or Roku or Tubi or even iTunes, for that matter? I would have been happy to pay $2.99 to watch this on iTunes, but it just wasn't there, forcing me to track it down on a torrent site, and I really hate to break copyright rules if I don't have to. I feel like every film should be available SOMEWHERE at all times, without me having to access dark web sites. But it seems this film just isn't in demand, perhaps it's not very popular because it feels like somebody forgot to finish it. What happens to Warren and Daphne, do they drive off together, leave Maine and never look back? I have no idea, because the movie couldn't be bothered to tell me. And why should I care about what happens to the characters if the writer clearly didn't?
Julianne Moore married the director of this film, and they have two children. See, now that's a development in somebody's life, but why couldn't we see anything like that within the film? Instead we get a lot of flashes of things happening in this house, but they're all like disconnected incidents and they don't come together, and so therefore the movie never really gets to any kind of point. I'm feeling a bunch of day-after holiday letdown for sure. And now I said I'd take some time off from movies, like the rest of November, so I'll be back here December 1 or so, with seven more movies, only how am I going to fill the time between now and then?
Also starring Roy Scheider (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Blythe Danner (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Noah Wyle (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Arija Bareikis (last seen in "The Purge"), Hope Davis (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Laurel Holloman, Michael Vartan (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Brian Kerwin (last seen in "27 Dresses"), James Le Gros (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Chris Bauer (last seen in "The Little Things"), Justin Barreto, Nicholas Bourgeois, Christopher Duva (last seen in "The Out-of-Towners" (1999)), Kelsey Gunn, Polly Pelletier, Pam Jack, Michael Rupert.
RATING: 4 out of 10 home movies
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