When your parents are auteur Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, there’s most certainly an undeniable amount of pressure to “be good”–at the very least–when making your own film that cinephiles will inevitably scrutinize. Especially if it’s a debut, as is the case with Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s (say that ten times fast) Home Again. While all the elements of the patented Nancy Meyers rom-com formula are present, there is something about the movie that misses the mark. Sure, you have the always plucky Reese Witherspoon in the lead part of recently separated Alice Kinney–daughter of acclaimed and deceased film director, John Kinney (David Netto)–and the younger male love interest, Harry (Pico Alexander) serving as an indication of the age boundaries for women Nancy Meyers so often likes to break in her own films (see: Erica Barry [Diane Keaton] and Julian Mercer [Keanu Reeves] in Something’s Gotta Give). But somehow, the flimsy premise of Home Again falls flat, often choosing not to bother with wrapping up certain key plot points as is the usual thorough modus operandi of Meyers’ work–often resulting in inordinately lengthy run times for rom-coms (e.g. The Parent Trap and The Holiday).
One thing that Hallie Meyers-Shyer does graft from her mother is use of 70s music (Yes’ “I’ve Seen All Good People” for the intro) and voiceover, with Alice narrating the opening as follows: “I was born in the summer of 1977 in Los Angeles, California. My father, John Kinney, received the news of my birth two days later when a telegram reached him on the Greek island of Mykonos where he was directing a film. He said it had just started raining, and the telegram arrived sopping wet. And written in Greek. The film’s camera operator translated: ‘Congratulations, she’s six pounds, twelve ounces and her name is Alice.'” It has an almost Mamma Mia quality, this scene and description. John Kinney, whose cinematic style looks to be modeled after John Cassavetes, with Candice Bergen as Lillian in the Gena Rowlands role of muse, seems to represent the mold of male Alice ultimately seeks in her own husband, Austen (Michael Sheen), a music producer who she has left behind in New York. And now, on the advent of her fortieth birthday, she appears to be returning to the source of what made her a glutton for pain for so long by going back to the house left to her by her father. And upon going “home again,” her flashbacks to the times when her father would always say, on each birthday, “This is your day, Alice. Your year. The future is yours,” smash cut to her crying alone in the bathroom before her two kids, Isabel (Lola Flanery) and Rosie (Eden Grace Redfield), knock on the door to wish her a happy birthday–the only day of the year during which she truly allows herself to let loose, hence giving the kids to grandma for the night and meeting up with her two friends, Tracy (Dolly Wells) and Kori (Jen Kirkman), at a bar/restaurant (because it’s California and everything is a bar/restaurant). And what would going out in L.A. be without encountering three aspiring filmmakers in the zygote age bracket? Harry, George (Jon Rudnitsky) and Teddy (Nat Wolff) being among such zygotes out for a celebration in honor of getting talent agency interest in a short film they premiered at SXSW (oh the cliches). And this, of course, is where Meyers-Shyer starts to get a bit lazy in her storytelling, for we’re supposed to believe that someone like Harry would be instantaneously attracted to Alice amid a sea of L.A.’s finest offerings of Barbie. Not to say Alice isn’t attractive, but, in order to believe in Harry’s beguilement, one would tend to think he has an Oedipus complex–but he himself isn’t even complex enough in character to fully exude this explanation. At least in Something’s Gotta Give, Julian possessed the maturity to know the value of a woman’s mind–in Harry’s case, this doesn’t seem to be the draw, for Alice is a floundering non-intellect toying with loose notions of interior design. The latter pursuit brings into play another irresolute plot thread involving socialite Zoey (Lake Bell), who seems to be loosely inspired by Tatum O’Neal as Kyra in the Sex and the City episode, “A Woman’s Right to Shoes,” with her blithe ignorance of others’ emotions. While the denouement of this interaction is intended to prove that Alice has at last become fully intolerant of bullshit, it merely adds to the hodgepodge construction of the screenplay, which does, at its core, feature glimmers of hope for Meyers-Shyer filling her mother’s shoes.
Meyers-Shyer is almost onto something–some near thesis of the film–when Alice arrives to the point of going on a blind date with Nate (Ben Sinclair), boring and stodgy in comparison to the excitement of Harry, and ends up getting so drunk that she needs to call George for help (this relationship being another loose thread in the movie), who brings her coffee and listens in earnest when she says, “Do you know what the difference is between men and women? Men, they can just do things. And women have to think about the consequences and the feelings and the pros and cons and…we make lists! And men just act. They just do.” In short, Meyers-Shyer is trying to say–through the mouth of her character–that men are inconsiderate shits with the accepted luxury of being inconsiderate sans comeuppance. Which is perhaps why the decision Alice arrives at by the end of the film veers toward an existence that favors a rapport with them solely through friendship. And this is where she differentiates herself from her mother in progressiveness, not feeling obligated to force Alice into any one relationship simply because this is the rhetoric long ago established by the likes of The Philadelphia Story. And maybe, as Meyers-Shyer more finely tunes her voice over the next few films (which one hopes she does end up making), she might become a new spokesperson for the rom-come genre in the twenty-first century, just as Nancy was in the twentieth.
