There are plenty of movies to watch this Thanksgiving, but this underrated 1995 gem starring Robert Downey Jr. is one you should stream this holiday season.
We all have different opinions about what is the ideal movie to watch over Thanksgiving. For some, they want a cheerful, sappy movie like The Family Stone that reminds them of the warm bonds of family. For others, they want to be taken away from reality with fantasy movies like any of the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movies.
For misanthropes like me, I prefer to watch a movie that reflects the messiness the holiday inevitably brings. When it was released in the fall of 1995, Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays didn’t cause much of a stir. Despite being directed by a two-time Oscar winner and starring Holly Hunter (who has just won an Oscar for 1993’s The Piano), Anne Bancroft (The Graduate‘s Mrs. Robinson), Claire Danes (hot off of My So-Called Life), and Robert Downey Jr. (the future Tony Stark), the movie flopped at the box office. Almost 30 years later, its cultural footprint is largely the same — non-existent.
But it’s a movie I always watch around this time because it reminds me of the family I escaped from and the one I still miss to this day. If that sounds contradictory, well, that’s the appeal of Home for the Holidays, a movie that nails the ambivalent feelings some of us have for returning home to feast on turkey and endure all the great and terrible things our families give us.The humor is grounded in everyday observations
Most Thanksgiving comedies tend to be lightweight, but Home for the Holidays is different. From its opening scene, in which the heroine, Claudia (Hunter), gets fired from her job, awkwardly makes out with her boss, and finds out her teenage daughter (Danes) intends to lose her virginity while she travels back home, the movie conveys its brand of cringe, observational humor it will dole out over the course of its 103 minutes.
When Claudia reunites with her parents, the movie presents them as they are: loving, if slightly ridiculous, but never as caricatures.
