After losing her job, making out with her soon to be ex-boss, and finding out that her daughter plans to spend Thanksgiving with her boyfriend, Claudia Larson has to face spending the holiday with her family.
This film is not currently playing on MUBI but 30 other great films are. See what’s now showing
It’s a particularly acute and meaningful experience for the queer viewer. Hardly just about screeching relatives, Foster’s raucous yet enormously touching film, from a layered script by W.D. Richter (who wrote the very great, queerish 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers), concerns the marginalization, alienation, and estrangement you can feel within your own family.
I’m not sure if at that point in my life I had yet encountered an ensemble film made by and for adults, in which multiple points of view and life experiences shot across the screen rapid fire, and in which the narrative was driven by quotidian experience and the push and pull of familial relations. What a revelation to encounter the energy of an action movie inside a film about being a member of a family.
Don’t let Hunter’s chipper demeanor and the sitcom-ish setup fool you. By the time Foster reaches the centerpiece dinner sequence (an amazing feat of editing by Lynzee Klingman), her vision of the familial reunion has intensified to life-or-death, do-or-die proportions, with each exhumed secret and pointed insult sending shudders across the table.
The middle section featuring a disastrous, hilarious, emotional Thanksgiving dinner is incredible. Shame the rest of the film is so lifeless. Charles Durning is good as is Holly Hunter (she will always be Rhea Jarrell for me now), but the lack of narrative thrust eventually wears out it's welcome.
“You’re a pain in the ass, you have bad hair, but I love you a lot.” Jodie Foster’s films have so much heart and sensitivity to them. Her style here feels like a mix between a tumbleweed and a tornado. There’s a frenetic energy throughout which perfectly encapsulates family get togethers.
Truly one of the most criminally unsung films of the 90s. Jodie Foster's sophomore effort as a director proves that she is as effective behind the camera as she is in front of it - this is a jumbled hurricane-of-a-movie, but purposely so. It's one of the truest depictions of a dysfunctional family that I've seen on screen.
The fourth star is only given because of the father's monologue toward the end when he is sitting in the basement with Holly Hunter. For sure a touching film that gives eloquent light to the middle-class during the holiday season, but one that also lacks in certain areas, even making me disinterested a time or two. Robert Downey Jr. is a delight as always, but something is ultimately missing. Overall it's watchable.