The more that time goes by, the more 1995’s Home for the Holidays asserts itself as a standout in the scantly populated genre of Thanksgiving movies (the only other truly notable classic in the “canon” is Planes, Trains and Automobiles). As Jodie Foster’s second directorial effort following Little Man Tate, it was clear she wanted to focus on a “smaller” subject matter that still ultimately homed in on the difficulties of being “different.” Particularly within the suffocating confines of one’s own family…a tale and theme furnished by Chris Radant’s short story of the same name and adapted by screenwriter W. D. Richter, who, fittingly, has a strong background in the horror genre. And, to most, what can be horrifying than family?
For the eldest daughter of the Larson family, Claudia (Holly Hunter), she might not be the most “different” among her brood, but it doesn’t drive her any less crazy to go back home for Thanksgiving, flying into Baltimore from Chicago after freshly getting fired from her job and then reacting to the news by embarrassingly making out with her much older boss.
In her state of distress on the plane (where she’s saddled with a Del Griffith [John Candy] type sitting right next to her and yammering on and on), she calls her brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr.), using the in-flight phone (spotlighting the height of technological advancement in the late twentieth century). Knowing that Tommy never shows up for Thanksgiving, living his own fabulous gay life with his partner, Jack (Sam Slovick), Claudia is feeling “fragile” enough (the word she later uses) to leave him a distraught message explaining everything that’s just happened to her and essentially begging him to join her at home so she can have a much-needed bit of moral support from her favorite sibling. Because that’s clearly not her ultra-conservative sister, Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson), who is as put upon about coming to her mother and father’s house with her own family as Claudia and Tommy are. Granted, Claudia and Tommy haven’t started their own “conventional” nuclear families the way that Joanne has, with Tommy going the then-still-novel “chosen family” route with Jack and their friends, and Claudia being a Lorelai Gilmore sort (before Lorelai Gilmore existed) with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Kitt (Claire Danes).
Even so, it’s blatant that their mother, Adele (Anne Bancroft), and father, Henry (Charles Durning), favor both of them over stodgy Joanne—regardless of the fact that Joanne self-martyrs herself by mentioning that she’s the only one who stayed close enough to take care of their aging parents. What’s more, Adele is that rare breed of mother who actually encourages Claudia to go back to her creative medium—painting—rather than continuing to restore other people’s artwork for the sake of a steady paycheck. But Claudia insists she’s no longer a painter—yet another case in point to Adele that she’s squandering her potential. That great parental fear for their children. The one that effectively means 1) they’ve “failed” and 2) they’re not getting enough of a return on their “investment.”
This is why, at one point, after the apex of the table drama that ends with Joanne having the entire turkey launched into her lap by Tommy, who can’t “get a grip” on it, Adele bemoans, “If only my children were happy.” Tommy counters, “We’re not unhappy.” Adele scoffs, “You’re all so unhappy.” This, to her, being a reflection not only of her presumably “bad” parenting, but also the fact that, in her mind, Claudia and Tommy aren’t making the “right” choices to be happy. With Adele scarcely even acknowledging Tommy’s sexuality until she’s slapped with the revelation that he’s married his longtime partner, it seems unfathomable to her that he might be happy “that way.” In a manner that, especially at that time, was still extremely stigmatized. For this reason, and many others, it’s obvious why Tommy has stayed away from the family in general and during holidays, never quite experiencing the level of acceptance he had hoped for/that he gets from his “chosen family.” A concept that was just starting to really pop off in the nineties, even with something as mainstream as Friends, which debuted a year before Home for the Holidays was released.
This is why a scene of Tommy talking to Jack on the phone and asking, “How’s my real family?” is essential and poignant to underscoring the idea that, more often than not, a person’s family is the one they make, not the one they’re born into. At least, if they’re being honest with themselves. So it is that Foster intercuts the phone conversation, showing Jack on the other side in a “chic apartment” setting among other blatant “Thanksgiving orphans” who are relishing a far more relaxed and “bohemian” atmosphere than anyone who decided to spend Thanksgiving with their biological family. Which brings one to the movie’s tagline, “On the fourth Thursday in November, 84 million American families will gather together…and wonder why.” A tagline that further iterates the change taking shape in American culture. One in which, more and more, people were turning away from the notion of “the family” in its traditional sense, while, at the same time, still being pulled relentlessly toward it. Often as a result of the previous generations’ sentimentality about it.
As Henry says in a circuitous way during his “giving thanks” at the table moment, “Even those old-fashioned, pain-in-the-ass traditions, like Thanksgiving, which really means something to us, even though goddamn it, we couldn’t tell you what it is, are starting to stop, and thousand-year-old trees are falling over dead, and they shouldn’t.” In other words, the overall sense of loyalty to “tradition” in American culture—particularly as it related to family—was starting to be kicked in violently by Gen X. Who were, at that juncture, the most jaded, desensitized generation yet. And could scarcely see the value in upholding traditions if this is where it had gotten them: overqualified and underemployed—hardly able to afford spawning new traditional nuclear families themselves. Branded “losers” and “dropouts” by their parents in a less concerned, more blasé manner than their parents’ parents had branded them during the hippie heyday. All of it indicating that the will to keep trying to uphold tradition was wearing thinner and thinner. Save for those Republican zealots like Joanne and her husband, Walter (Steve Guttenberg).
Jack responds to Tommy’s question with the assurance, “Your real family’s great, they all love you. They’re all here eating turkey in our bed.” At that moment, a woman named Susan passes by and shouts, “Come home Tommy!” The further implication being that his home is not with his biological family, and never really was. Hence, Adele making the sad assessment to Tommy, “Even as a little boy, you didn’t want us too close.” But why, then, would he want to be, sensing that he ultimately couldn’t be his authentic self with “these people”? And isn’t that, in the end, what always keeps somewhat at bay, as a kind of a stranger? Claudia feels particularly similar when it comes to Joanne, with whom she tries to make peace with after the tense Thanksgiving gathering, only to be told coldly by her sister that if they met on the street and she gave Joanne her number, she would just throw it away.
Luckily for Claudia, Tommy brought along another “chosen family” member, Leo Fish (Dylan McDermott), specifically “for” Claudia. Though, for much of the day, she assumes that Jack has been thrown over by Tommy in favor of this new “snack.” And it is of Leo that she asks, “When you go home, do you look around and wonder, ‘Who are these people? Where did I even come from?’ You look at them all sitting there, you know? They look familiar, but who the hell are they?” The inability to recognize that you could come from a place that has no bearing on who you are—or at least how you see yourself—in the present is part of a sense of disorientation and displacement that became more common in the twentieth century, particularly at the end of the 1960s and onward.
As Don DeLillo addressed in 1985’s White Noise, the disintegration and breakdown of everything that people—namely, American people—once held dear was causing a kind of ripple effect in the mental well-being of society at large. An undercurrent of skepticism and loss of faith in institutions is at the heart of Home for the Holidays as well, even with some of the most off-handed moments of dialogue. For example, Tommy shrugging at the question of how Jack “is,” “It’s the nineties. How’s anyone?” Or Henry’s off-handed joke about Bill Clinton—three years before he would be impeached over the Monica Lewinsky scandal—telling the table, “That’s all this bozo up in the White House is up to…among other things.” That last part said as he makes an innuendo-laden fist-pumping gesture.
In an earlier part of the film, this collective feeling of bafflement and discombobulation that ramped up in the nineties is further evidenced by Adele telling Claudia about a question she saw in Dear Abby, delivered in such a way so as to make the viewer believe that perhaps Adele was the one who wrote it, reciting it from memory to Claudia as follows: “I think my mother is losing her grip on reality. All her life, she’s been this happy-go-lucky, outgoing personality, who cried a lot in private, but to strangers was a barrel of laughs. Now lately, she’s gotten real bad. She wakes up every morning frightened. And she gets real worked up about war and crime and taxes and those terrorists. She thinks the president secretly owns McDonald’s and the home shopping channel. It’s not funny. Signed, Distraught.”
The inability to reconcile what is with what was is at the core of this question. With older generations insistent that things were so much simpler and better in their era of youth than they are in the current one. And yet, it was “back then” when one didn’t even have the option to turn to a chosen family in order to feel free enough to be who they really were. Without judgment, without prejudice.
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