Home hum

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS. Directed by Jodie Foster. Written by W.D. Richter based on a story by Chris Radant. With Holly Hunter, Anne Bancroft, Charles Durning, Robert Downey Jr., Dylan McDermott, Cynthia Stevenson, Geraldine Chaplin, Claire Danes, and Steve Guttenberg. A Paramount Pictures release. At the Cheri, the Fresh Pond, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

Based on a 1990 Boston Phoenix article by Chris Radant, Home is a story, for better and worse, that many of us can identify with. In self-exile in Chicago, Claudia (Holly Hunter) must endure the annual pilgrimage back home to the suburbs of Baltimore for Thanksgiving. It's a ritual of familial mutual laceration that she dreads, but her own life is such a shambles that dinner with the folks almost seems a refuge.

In a somewhat pat litany, she loses her job as a museum art restorer (photographer Lajos Koltai gets to show his stuff with a dazzling close-up montage of her touching up a canvas with egg tempura), loses her decorum when she passionately kisses her sixtysomething ex-boss, is told by daughter Kitt (Claire Danes literally phoning in her role) that she plans to lose her virginity while Claudia is away, and then loses her coat in the airport. The comic mishaps, down to the garrulous boor in the seat next to her on the flight and the gridlock at the airport when she lands, are predictable but paced pertly, and Hunter makes a witty and sympathetic sufferer.

Claudia's chaotic departure is just a placid set-up compared to the barrage of familiar, dysfunctional family types that follows. Mom Adele (Anne Bancroft) is a motormouthed, chainsmoking meddler in a bad wig; dad Henry is a easy-going oddball (he likes to wash the neighbors' cars) the size of the Graf Spee zeppelin; older sister Joanne (Cynthia Stevenson) is a profoundly stable and unhappy housewife with two rude children and Steve Guttenberg as a husband; and younger brother Tommy (Robert Downey Jr., who seems under the influence of more than method acting) is a frenetic prankster (he likes to snap pictures of sister "Clyde" in various stages of undress) who is gay in every sense of the word. And, of course, there is the dotty maiden aunt, Glady (Geraldine Chaplin), who likes to give people ugly lamps.

Not that any conflict is needed to set this nest of common oddities rattling, but the plot, such as it is, involves the fate of Tommy's absent longtime companion and the identity of his mystery guest, Leo Fish (Dylan McDermott). The film's real tension, however, lies in the performers' efforts to animate their sit-com characters, and Foster's struggle to inject the laughter with the requisite tears. An example of the triumph of the former is Chaplin's Glady. True, she does serve as the butt of some cheap humor (she breaks wind without comment in a car full of people in one subtle moment) but she carries her eccentricity with such blithe inspiration that it transcends caricature. So too does Durning as dad - dogged, crusty, and daft, he plays the perfect accompaniment to Glady when she hums "From the Halls of Montezuma."

With such talent to work with and by orchestrating their performances in an Altman-like overlapping ensemble, Foster almost escapes Home without bathos. A scene in which Glady interrupts dinner with a monologue about her erotic longings for Henry decades after a chaste kiss passes from hilarity to horror to near tragedy within a few moments. It's a masterpiece of tone and timing, unlike the scene a moment later when the turkey flies into Joanne's lap, or the inescapable clinches of reconciliation and inevitable parent-child pow-wows of world wisdom. Like the experience of the title, Home for the Holidays is familiar but somehow new, something dreaded but a lot better than expected.